On Wednesday, a spinoff of a Dallas-based telehealth/behavioral health company announced it will locate its headquarters in Bowling Green, Kentucky — and create about 30 jobs in the process at Western Kentucky University’s Innovation Campus. That’s the long-term view.
The more immediate impact will come in the form of the 50-plus mental health professionals from Oria Health — consisting of therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists — having the ability to provide their services to residents of Kentucky.
That’s because Oria Health was co-founded by Amanda Havard, who is the founder of Lunae, a business-to-business, management service startup that will now call Bowling Green home.
Oria Health will be the core client of Lunae, which is focused on the intellectual property (IP) centered around “human-centered design principles and multiple developmental and learning theories to take the creativity and the brilliance of innovation to create something tangible,” according to a news release.
According to Havard, every Kentucky county has been determined to be underserved when it comes to mental health services. I spoke with Havard on Wednesday at the Bowling Green Chamber of Commerce while on assignment for a future cover story for Louisville Business First (more on that later).
“Our commitment to our clients, to our community and to ourselves is to leave things better than we find them,” Havard said in a release that was sent out a few minutes after I spoke with her. “Oria’s tagline is people helping people, and we witnessed all sorts of people helping us to get us to Bowling Green. We could not be more grateful or thrilled to be growing Oria in Kentucky, or to plant Lunae’s roots in Bowling Green.”
Oria Health is based out of the Dallas area, so all the mental health professionals who are under contract are based out of Texas — as is their clientele, which averages about 5,000 appointments a month. As of a recent date, most of those providers now have their licensure in Kentucky. In addition, the company is starting to recruit mental health providers throughout the commonwealth.
Havard said that Kentuckians will benefit as a whole in three ways as the company prepares to occupy approximately 1,200 square footage of the innovation campus.
- Kentuckians can access the services of Oria Health immediately.
- The company is working with WKU to provide supervision for providers-in-training going through the program to receive their licensure to practice in Kentucky.
- Oria can work with Kentucky-based companies or nonprofits that have earmarked mental health funding but have not been able to access the services up until this point, for whatever reason.
'Moving in the same direction'
Havard is moving from the Dallas area, the home of Lunae’s parent company, Oria Health, which she co-founded with Richard Connell in February 2021 after moving back to her hometown at the start of the Covid pandemic. Oria, which has 17 employees, has been bootstrapped from its beginnings, but should have a revenue in the vicinity of $4.2 million by the end of the year, Havard said.
Havard was familiar with Bowling Green, having earned two degrees at Vanderbilt University in nearby Nashville, Tennessee, and having met Sam Ford, an innovation and culture fellow (among many titles) at the Central Region Ecosystem for Arts, Technology and Entrepreneurship (CREATE) based at the innovation campus. They were introduced while they both lived in New York City many years ago.
When she first visited with members of the Bowling Green community, Havard said the biggest factor of wanting to start her new enterprise in the town largely came down to the synergy she experienced when talking to members of the innovation campus, WKU, the city’s chamber of commerce and other city leaders.
“You all seem to share a vision for what this place could be. I don’t know how every time I talk to someone else in this town, they also share that vision, and you’re all trying to help each other … You’re all telling me the same story, but with different words, which means you’re not even playing from a playbook,” Havard said. “You just generally all want to be moving in the same direction.”
In addition, the Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) preliminary approved Lunae for $200,000 in tax incentives through the Kentucky Enterprise Initiative Act (KEIA), which allows approved companies to recoup sales and use tax in the commonwealth on construction costs, equipment and building fixtures, among other entities. The KEDFA report was released on June 29.
The listed investment on the KEDFA document is $260,000, but the planned total capital investment is $500,000, according to a release.
The tax incentives are subject to the company creating 33 full-time jobs within a 10-year time frame with an average hourly wage of $28 an hour.
The Lunae announcement is the second announcement in the last three months of an out-of-state company establishing a presence inside the WKU Innovation Campus, following San Francisco-based MyXR’s decision to create a regional headquarters there. The growing software firm, which specializes in augmented reality, AI and gamification, is set to hire a team of 60 people to work in its new office.
