An Interview with Sonia Garcia, Co-Founder & CGO of Amae Health

Polina: Tell us a little about the founding of the company and the story behind its name.

Sonia Garcia (SG): Amae Health is an integrated outpatient provider for individuals with severe mental illness (SMI). Both myco-founder, Stas, and I have had really tough and quite traumatic experiences with SMI within our families. Stas' father and sister struggle with bipolar disorder and have faced incarceration, many hospitalizations, and difficulties accessing the right care. In my case, I lost my father to suicide 16 years ago, which deeply affected my family, especially my brother, who experienced his first psychotic break in college and was later diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. So for both Stas and I, this all started from a very personal place where we were trying to find effective care for our families, and that led us to pursue careers aimed at improving care for families like ours.

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I started out in biomedical engineering, then moved into healthcare strategy consulting, and later went to StanfordUniversity in 2018 to get a Master’s degree in mental health innovation as aKnight-Hennessy Scholar. Stas was working in impact investing at the ChanZuckerberg Initiative and living at Stanford with his wife, who was attendingStanford’s business school. However, our paths didn’t cross then. After graduating, I worked at a pediatric behavioral health provider called Brightline, and Stas and his wife moved to San Francisco. Years later in 2021,I reconnected with a mutual friend from Stanford, who was also in the behavioral health space and had founded her own company. I told her I wanted to more directly impact the SMI population, and given she knew Stas’ family background and shared passion, she made the fateful decision to introduce us.Our first meeting was at the Japanese Tea Gardens in San Francisco, a place we chose because of our shared appreciation for Japanese culture and its emphasison community.

At that first meeting, we agreed, “if not us, then who?” and decided to start the company to create a new standard of care for SMI. The name Amae Health is inspired by the Japanese concept of"amae," which means the ability to depend on those around you to helpyou thrive. We have a core belief at Amae that community and holistic support are essential for recovery. This remains a foundational principle in ourmission to provide individuals in need with access to long-term, community-driven care.

PH: That's a really powerful story and thank you for sharing it. You, your families, and your loved ones lived through these very difficult experiences, and unfortunately are not the only ones within our country who go through this. COVID exacerbated the impacts of serious mental illness and there's a lot of mental health focused companies that are trying to address various points of the challenge. When you initially met, what did you discover that was missing from the existing solution set and how is Amae addressing those challenges?

SG: We had so many insights from what we’d gone through within our families, but we identified three key issues we aimed to address with Amae.

First, SMI is often managed episodically, even though it’s a chronic condition needing lifelong care. Many existing solutions focus on short-term stabilization, neglecting long-term needs. So for us, itwas really important to manage this longitudinally according to the nature of the condition, and we designed a long-term care model.

Second, virtual care is ineffective for SMI.People with conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder need in-person treatment, as they often have hallucinations, paranoia, and other symptoms that make virtual interactions challenging. In-person care allows for more accurate assessments and better engagement. It also allows us to create a community and provide social support, which is such an important part of what we do.

Third, psychiatry alone isn’t enough. We have a multidisciplinary care team that delivers whole-person, wrap-around care.Much like an oncologist leads the treatment team for cancer care, our psychiatrists lead the team, with therapists, health coaches, dietitians, primary care doctors, peer supports, and member support specialists allwrapping around the patient to address their mental, physical, and social challenges.

PH: At the end of the day, outcomes are important. But sometimes Ithink, particularly within the mental health area, it's hard to judge what the outcome is or should be. It's not a broken bone where when it’s healed, it’s healed. So how are you measuring success and what are you paying attention to make sure that the program is working?

SG: Totally hear you. It's one of the biggest pain points in behavioral health – the lack of standardized measures. At Amae, we’ve taken a multimodal measurement approach to track outcomes across mental, physical, and social well-being domains comprehensively. We use Palantir as our main data integration and analysis platform to aggregate and interpret complex data sets, providing actionable insights and supporting decision-making processes.

For the mental domain, we use a digital assessment tool called Computer Adaptive Testing for Mental Health, or CAT-MH for short. We leverage a proprietary algorithm tailored to each patient to measure their symptom severity across depression, anxiety, suicidality, psychosis, and mania within a few minutes. We also collect and report on HEDIS measures. Across the physical domain, we collect metabolic labs and track exercise, sleep, and diet. And for the social and well-being domain, we set and track personalized life goals for our patients to foster stability and social connection. This could mean returning to work or school, rebuilding relationships, or achieving self-sufficiency. This last part is crucial for several reasons: it’s meaningful for our patients and helps maintain high engagement, and it reinforces that Amae truly cares about them as whole humans.

PH: How does somebody get into the program?

SG: We primarily engage and partner with hospitals, as this is typically the first place individuals with SMI go when they are undergoing a crisis, such as a psychotic break or a suicide attempt.Once a hospital stabilizes these patients medically, they need to transition them to a safe place where their mental illness can be treated. That’s where Amae comes in. We operate as the outpatient, long-term care solution that hospitals and providers send patients with SMI to.

Through our community center and integrated care program, our job is to holistically treat patients and prevent them from undergoing another hospitalization. We develop personalized and flexible treatment plans for each patient and become the “one-stop-shop” (as our patients and families like to call it) for all of their behavioral and physical health needs. Individuals can also contact us and access care directly through the contact number listed on our website.

PH: The entire premise of the service is built around the idea of community and a care team. And every great company needs a great team to succeed. So as Amae grows, what is your approach to building out a great team?

SG: I love this question. One of the most exciting parts about this journey is bringing together people who really care and building out a team that is passionate about solving this issue through an in-person, community-centered approach, where each person feels empowered by working in a multidisciplinary team setting rather than operating as astand alone provider in private practice. It is so energizing. Also, to the markets we operate in, we’re seen as a local provider, so every clinic we setup is intentionally staffed with local leadership who deeply understand that community, all the cultural nuances, and what it takes to really treat this population well.

But that said, it’s not enough to bring together great individuals. We are also really intentional about training and developing a great team. To do this, we internally developed the ‘Amae Institute,’ a training platform and tool that contains methodologies, guidelines, and programming to support multidisciplinary communication and operations. We’re also incorporating generative AI to help standardize clinical decision-making and eventually develop a precision medicine platform.

It's amazing when you bring it all together.You see that with the right people, the right tools, and the right treatment, patients get better, lead healthy lives, make a decent living for themselves, and find meaning in their lives again.

PH: You know, you founded the company a couple of years ago and have just announced the recent $15M raise. As you are looking towards growth, what are you most looking forward to accomplishing with the capital?

SG: We currently have two clinics and are expanding into several more locations this year. We have our Los Angeles andNorth Carolina clinics up and running, and will soon launch New York and thenHouston. And that’s only the beginning! There are over 14 million adults in theUS that battle with SMI, so there’s a great need for our services, and we’re being approached by healthcare leaders in numerous markets who’ve stated they’d really like to have Amae in their community.

What I’m also really looking forward to, in addition to expanding, is the investment in a lot of research to further the field of psychiatry as a whole. We already have research partnerships with the Baszucki Group to work on metabolic psychiatry and are working on a digital sensing study with Apple and UCLA. We have a huge opportunity ahead of us to not only deliver the care that's so needed but also to generate lasting impact by leveraging research to advance treatment, improve medication, develop new therapeutics, and enhance precision medicine for the SMI population.

PH: You started this conversation with the question of “if not us,then who?” If you could go back in time, what would you tell yourself about the entrepreneurship journey?

SG: I knew the journey would be hard. I’ve worked in healthcare my whole professional career and have spent countless days and nights navigating the healthcare system for my loved ones. But I’ve also known that this is what I wanted to do with my life since I was 16 years old, on the day that I found out I’d lost my dad to suicide. So I think I would start by saying, “stay authentic, stay true to the mission at hand.”

I’d also tell myself to “learn to say no, but don’t ever take no for an answer”. I used to think I needed to please everyone and say yes to every request to end up where I wanted to be. And I struggled with paying too much attention to the naysayers along the way that would challenge the concept of in-person care or would challenge the ability for individuals with SMI to lead good, healthy lives; but I've seen it for my family and I know it can be done. At Amae, we've seen it with our patient population in California and North Carolina and we're going to do it with everyone else. One of our core values is “our job isn’t done until the job is done”. We’ve worked to foster resilience across the whole company, which is really important to us. We need to be resilient, not just for the company, but for our patients, and for the broader mission we’re tackling at Amae.

PH: What a great testament to Amae and to the core belief that youneed a strong support system in order to do something really difficult butequally rewarding. Thank you for sharing your story with us today!

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