Alcoholic recovery startup Reframe raised a $1.4 million seed round to build out its product features.
Atlanta Ventures, a firm founded by local entrepreneur David Cummings, led the round. Multiple local investors participated, including entrepreneurs Kaneva CEO Chris Klaus, SalesLoft CEO Kyle Porter and MaxBounty Chief Financial Officer Dave Harrington.
The Reframe app, which now has about 3,000 users, has a mix of content that includes interactive activities, recovery stories, affirmations and education tools to help people kick alcoholism.
“We want it to be such an experience that people are looking forward to it,” said Vedant Pradeep, Reframe's co-founder and president. “As much as it is a medical problem, it’s also a social problem. We want to make it so acceptable that it’s trendy.”
Pradeep and co-founder Ziyi Gao are Georgia Tech graduates and Inno under 25 honorees who developed the app using lessons they learned while talking with Emory University and Johns Hopkins University medical experts and Georgia Tech professors who spoke with more than 500 people at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
The co-founders are working to add personalized coaching to the app and making it an integrated solution to help people curb their addiction while also bettering their mental and physical health.
Pradeep said their goal is 100,000 users by the end of the year and to expand their two-person team to 10, hiring mostly engineers and designers.
“Ideally we want people who are passionate about this space and want to help others quit drinking or cut back,” Pradeep said.
Users have primarily found the Reframe app through word of mouth and social media recovery groups. About 90% of its growth has come organically, Pradeep said.
Reframe charges users less than $10 a month. The app is a fraction of the cost of going to a recovery center, Pradeep said, making it accessible to more people battling alcoholism.
