Why we invested in Maya Health?
At Leafy Tunnel, we are on a mission to dedicate ourselves to humanity’s quest for longer, healthier and happier lives by advancing a new class of alternative medicines with extraordinary therapeutic potential. Our investment in Maya Health is an excellent example of how we fulfil this mission.
Maya Health is a measurement-based care platform designed to support psychedelic practitioners and patients. Through several years of conversations with practitioners of all types, the Maya Health team learned about the importance of planning their patients’ journey from preparation and facilitation to integration and completion. Key challenges for practitioners are to measure patients’ data, including their state of mind, psycho-metrics, socio-metrics, physiology/biometrics, indications, prior experience, medications, quality of life, etc. These patients’ data were not previously possible to measure across stages before receiving treatment, throughout the entire patient journey, and culminating in health outcomes.
This unmet need created an opportunity for Maya Health to offer a system that practitioners can adopt to manage their practice and patient experience, bring transparency by tracking the patient journey and then analyse health outcomes both on an individual level and across the clinic.
When we met the Maya Health team in 2020, we were convinced that this is the right team to execute the company’s vision. Maya Health’s founder, David Champion, had already proven his ability to build a leading SaaS company in alternative medicine. This is seen from his journey with Baker Technologies, a leading CRM software company for cannabis dispensaries which he founded and subsequently exited for around $250M. Five other core team members of Maya Health had also previously worked together to build Baker Technologies, creating a solid foundation to replicate the success of Baker Technologies in the psychedelics industry. In addition, Maya Health’s core team members are recognised leaders in the psychedelics community. David was the campaign lead for the Denver Psilocybin Initiative, which propelled Denver to become the first US city to enact psilocybin policy reform.
The defensibility of Maya Health lies in their team approach and ability to integrate customer feedback to develop the company’s product. Since the founding of the company, the team has been co-developing the Maya Health platform with the Council of Guides to ensure that the platform meets the needs of the psychedelics community. The Council of Guides consists of licensed psychedelics practitioners, and they have been providing constant feedback to the Maya Health team on virtually every facet of the business, from feature selection to pricing plans.
The entire Maya Health platform has also been built to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA was introduced to digitalise the flow of healthcare information and covers all healthcare providers who communicate healthcare information electronically. HIPAA compliance, therefore, enables the Maya Health platform to scale rapidly and demonstrates the forward-thinking mindset of the Maya team.
The Maya Health platform also features a unique set of tools that enable practitioners to deliver a superior standard of care to patients. Practitioners using the Maya Health platform can access standardised measurement tools and share information anonymously and in compliance with HIPAA. This allows practitioners to compare outcomes of different treatments to identify what works and enables greater reproducibility across the world. The Maya Health platform also automates administrative tasks such as sending forms at various stages of the patient journey, allowing practitioners to focus on their patients instead of administration.
Enabling collaboration in the psychedelic space is also vital for the Maya Health team. Therefore, their platform has been specially designed to be able to integrate new features from other industry leaders. For example, Maya is planning to incorporate a learning management system powered by Rise, the global leader in online training. This system will provide services from cloud-based learning management to HIPAA-compliant messaging.
We invested in Maya Health as we saw an unmet need in the psychedelic treatment industry for a platform that tracks patient information throughout the patient journey. We were confident that the Maya Health team would be able to build this platform as we were impressed with how they built a leading SaaS company in the cannabis industry. Today, the unique features of the Maya Health platform prove the ability of the team to understand and meet the needs of the psychedelic community, and we are confident that their platform will raise the standard of care that psychedelic practitioners can offer.
