#2 Pear-Shaped: How the darling of digital therapeutics raised $400m and then went bankrupt.
A case study on Pear Therapeutics, an AI business supporting blended care, and all this week's latest mental health news and job openings.
Hi friends,
There’s one question that’s been on my mind for over a year now.
What the hell happened to Pear Therapeutics?
They were once the darling of the mental health startup world before going out in a ball of flames. But why??
This week, I finally got an answer to it and wrote 2,500 words explaining everything I learned… It’s a lot, I know, but I promise you it’s worth it.
The good news is I had a bunch of fun doing it too. Looks like deciding to write The Hemingway Report was a good idea after all and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Before we dive into this week’s content…
I’d love to hear what you think of The Hemingway Report.
So please reply to this email with your thoughts. The reason I write it is to be helpful to people like you, so please tell me what you enjoy and what you’d like more of. It would be incredibly helpful.
This week in The Hemingway Report:
Pear-Shaped: How Pear Therapeutics went bankrupt after raising $400m (and what we can learn from them)
Limbic AI: the London based company using AI to deliver blended care
Profitability (finally): Talkspace reaches profitability after shifting focus to B2B model
Jobs: open positions at the top mental health businesses
Limbic AI is really really interesting - glad I read till the end
Brilliant read. Maybe a topic for a future deep dive and something that could be explored in relation pear - identifying target markets based on advertising regulation. In the US, medicines are advertised everywhere on all platforms all the time and this is essentially unfettered by regulation. In stark contrast, other markets prohibit such advertising. The internet, podcast advertising and advertising that isn’t constrained by a jurisdictional regulatory requirement can completely circumvent laws but perhaps a key part of the target audience aren’t on the internet and so the advertising doesn’t reach them?! Just a hypothesis but would love to hear what pear’s marketing strategy was around this and fair enough if it was all US centric as it was the looses regulatory regime for advertising.