reasonan online platform connecting aspiring therapists and clinical supervisors, Announce It closed a $14 million Series A round on Thursday.
Cox Enterprises Leading this round, there are also Steel Sky Ventures and Great Oaks Ventures. The round brings Motivo’s total funding to $16.3 million.
Rachel McCrickard founded the Atlanta-based startup in 2018 to provide easy-to-find, affordable clinical supervision for people trying to become therapists. She wanted to address the inaccessibility of recent graduate clinicians trying to gain licensure, something she experienced firsthand on her path to becoming a licensed marriage and family therapist.
In order to be licensed, therapists must complete clinical supervision hours, which is similar to the process a doctor completes a residency. Once an aspiring therapist earns a master’s degree, they must work under another therapist’s professional license for two years. The process is expensive because therapists have to pay their supervisors to earn those hours, and it’s challenging because clinical supervisors are often hard to find, McCricard said in an interview.
McCricard, who is from rural northern Georgia, was the most recent one in Atlanta when he tried to connect with a clinical director after graduation.At the time, it was a two-hour drive for her various ways – She drove back and forth every week for 2 years.
“It’s been a long, arduous, expensive process for me,” McCricard said. “I persevered and eventually got my license, but I noticed states were starting to pass rules saying you can do virtual supervision with HIPAA compliant video. I thought, ‘Okay, when I’m driving to and from Atlanta every week, this is going to come to me It would be much easier to say.'”
In response to these new rules, McCrickard and her team built a market model of clinical supervisors licensed in all 50 states to provide virtual supervision.
When recent graduates come to the platform, they enter information about which state they live in and what type of license they are seeking. Motivo returns a list of available supervisors in the state, allowing users to filter the list and determine who they want to work with based on whether the supervisor serves a population of interest to them or whether the supervisor goes to the same college.
Motivo has helped more than 2,500 therapists become licensed. Without such a marketplace, recent graduates would have to use search engines to track down clinical supervisors they would like to work with in their state, McCricard announced. Then, they had to call each supervisor to determine if they needed more supervisors, their availability, and how much they charged.
McCricard said Motivo has about 1,000 clinical supervisors on its platform and is licensed in all 50 states. All tutors on the platform are available and accept the same rates, eliminating the time-consuming process of graduates having to call different tutors.
The startup charges recent graduates $75 an hour for personal supervision. McCrickard, who was paid $90 an hour after graduating in 2008, said in some states the rate has been as high as $200 an hour for supervisors not on the Motivo platform.
Given that the rules allowing therapists to complete clinical supervision via video only passed a few years ago, Motivo doesn’t appear to have much competition — it’s the first to offer a marketplace to match aspiring therapists with virtual clinical supervision, McCrickard claims company. This gives the startup a market advantage as it works to increase sales. McCrickard said Motivo will use the money it raised in the Series A round to increase hiring, primarily for its sales, marketing and engineering teams.
Image credit: Reason
