IMPACTASSETS 50™
An Annual Showcase of Impact Investment Fund Managers
ImpactAssets 50
An Annual Showcase of Impact Investment Fund Managers
GreyMatter
Demographic-based Impact
Health and WellbeingFirm Overview
Mental illness, drug addiction, neurological diseases, and loneliness are widespread. Despite the shift in stigma, new legislative and governmental support, and increased innovation and investment around mental health, stakeholders across research, payors, providers, policy, and technology remain disparate and siloed in their expertise. There is opportunity to break down barriers and create collaborative infrastructure required for supporting innovation. GreyMatter Capital is building the premier venture platform for mental health and well-being. By investing in exceptional founders at the forefront of innovation, we are redefining the way we diagnose, treat and improve mental health. We are building the platform and infrastructure, to break down those silos. We invest primarily at the early stage (Pre-Seed and Seed), with the ability to do select incubations and co-creations, taking advantage of gaps we see in the market.
Years of Operation: Less than 3 years
% of Capital from Top 3 Investors: 25% – 49%
GreyMatter exists to unlock breakthrough progress in mental and behavioral health, investing in innovative companies across mental health and wellness, behavioral healthcare, infrastructure & tools for mental health care delivery companies, and frontier technologies.
Fueled by both long-term disparities and near-term catalysts, mental health remains the defining issue of our era. Over the last century, humans have made tremendous progress in advancing physical health: from nearly tripling our lifespan to fighting infant mortality, viral disease, HIV and now cancer. However, we are just starting to understand how the brain & mind work, and the next 50 years promises to be a transformative time. We believe that it is possible for technology-driven innovation to dramatically improve the world's collective mental health. GreyMatter Capital is building the premier venture firm focused on addressing mental and behavioral health challenges. We invest across three areas: mental health and wellness, behavioral health care-delivery and frontier technologies such as neurotech. We back companies focused on connection and resilience, mental performance, youth mental health, SMI/crisis care, clinician supply shortages, addiction, maternal mental health, AI/ML, infrastructure & tools and digital therapeutics.
The mental health founder journey is complex and requires specialized expertise. Despite the changing landscape of mental health innovation, there are no institutional-grade, specialist venture firms in the space. We believe that our deep mental health sector expertise, breadth and depth of network (including former CEOs of the Optum and Anthem behavioral health businesses), and personal passion uniquely positions GreyMatter to successfully identify the most promising founders and support them through the startup journey. Our strong network of investors and founders provides exceptional inbound dealflow, our thesis-driven research and insights drive decision-making advantage through the diligence process, and our ability to provide specialized support creates a right-to-win. We support founders by curating a deep, multidisciplinary network of experts, connecting them to talent, partners and customers, helping shape their strategy using established playbooks and data, and providing specialized guidance and coaching.
Investment Example
In Q2 of this year (2023), GreyMatter invested in Flourish Health, a company supporting adolescents with serious mental illness, starting with the Medicaid population. Their multidisciplinary care teams offer personalized treatment, engaging both the patient and their family. Flourish’s technology coordinates, tracks and facilitates early intervention, by using wearables to detect early signs of regression, in turn improving outcomes and reducing hospitalizations. Flourish is reimagining care delivery to an extremely vulnerable and traditionally underserved population and their model has enabled them to reach those who may not have otherwise sought care. The founders have a deep expertise and empathy for this problem, and a demonstrated ability to execute together, and create a business model that aligns incentives across providers and insurance through Alternative Payment Models (AMP).
Leadership and Team
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Danish Munir – Founding Partner, GreyMatter Capital More Info
Danish is an experienced founder and investor with over 10 years of experience in the mental health space. Prior to GreyMatter, Danish founded Genoa Telepsychiatry, scaled Genoa to become the largest telepsychiatry company in the country, and sold the business to Optum in 2018. After seeing the evolution of digital mental health at Optum where we evaluated dozens of mental health startups, he decided to dedicate his next act in mental health to taking a systems level approach in improving the entrepreneurial journey. |
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Andrew Barr – Founding Partner More Info
Prior to GreyMatter, Andrew advised and invested at the intersection of mental health and technology, supporting a range of startups and nonprofits. He brings lived experience to his work, having struggled with OCD as a teenager. Before working in the mental health space, he was Co-Founder of Prefer, a Benchmark-backed startup serving independent workers. Prior to that, Andrew was an investor at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), a multibillion-dollar later stage venture firm. |
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Natalie Bartlett – Venture Partner More Info
Natalie is a startup investor turned operator with a deep interest in the behavioral health space. She previously held investing and platform roles with General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. |
Financial Performance
Impact Performance
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Percentage of Total Assets Under
Management that are Impact Investments: |
75% – 99%
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We invest in companies that solve gaps of mental health access for underserved populations, either through their products or go-to-market channels. We invest in companies that work with Medicare and Medicaid populations as well as Commercial insurance, or whose products meet the unique needs of underrepresented populations. Examples include Flourish Health, a Serious Mental Illness company primarily working with teens and young adults on Medicaid, and Yuvo, a company empowering FQHCs to scale and support primary care for low income communities. Given our sector focus, the majority of companies we see have impact at their core, which is inherently measurable in terms of the # of lives impacted, improved mental health outcomes or reduction in total cost of care. For infrastructure companies we invest in, we think about how their work enables other care delivery companies to scale faster and the second order impact they have on mental health access.
Impact Tracking and Monitoring
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53 W 72 St, 7D, New York, NY 10023 USA
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