Meet moka.care, a French startup that has built several services that should help you improve your psychological well-being. The company sells its solution to employers directly. They can then offer access to moka.care to their employees.
The startup raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) funding round from Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Jeremy Uzan and Raffi Kamber. A long list of business angels are also participating in today’s round, such as Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Ning Li (Made.com, Typology), Florian Douetteau (Dataiku), Céline Lazorthes (Leetchi, MangoPay), Pierre Dubuc (OpenClassrooms), Marc-Antoine de Longevialle (LeCab), Adrien Ledoux (JobTeaser), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Thibault Lamarque (CASTALIE) and Côme Fouques (Indy).
Moka.care believes that companies aren’t doing enough when it comes to mental health. Many companies give you a phone number and tell you that you can call that number to get mental support. But few employees actually call those helplines.
That’s why the startup is taking a completely different approach. The most important principle is that people are looking for different things. And you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for when you’re feeling down. When you first contact moka.care, the company spends roughly half an hour talking with you to understand what you’re looking for.
There are three main options after that. Moka.care could send you some recommendations for a practitioner — it can be a psychologist, a certified coach or a licensed therapist. Moka.care also organizes group sessions around a specific topic. It could be focused on remote work, work-life balance, self-confidence, etc. Finally, moka.care also provides content on some of those topics. You can access that content and learn more about yourself.
With this granular approach, the company hopes it can tackle mental health conditions before it’s too late — you don’t want to recommend a therapist when an employee is already suffering from excessive stress, fatigue or burnout.
Employees don’t pay for the first sessions as it’s part of moka.care’s plans. This way, the barrier to entry should be much lower for employees. Of course, if you want to book further appointments, you’ll have to pay at some point.
For employers, moka.care tries to lower the barrier to entry as well. Clients agree on a per-employee-per-month subscription plan based on some usage rate. If your employees end up using moka.care more than that, you don’t pay more. If your employees don’t use the service at all and you’re overpaying, the startup pays you back.
There are 30 companies currently using moka.care — it represents thousands of employees that could potentially create an account and access the service. The startup currently works with around 50 practitioners.
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