After raising $11 million in a Series A round earlier this year, Richmond behavioral therapy company AnswersNow is aiming to launch in several new states.
“We want to build a sustainable organization,” co-founder and CEO Jeff Beck said. “We raised the money to double down on our efforts on some of the areas that we were in and build some relationships with some [insurance companies]. We wanted to iterate and improve on the product. It is everything that goes into scaling a startup.”
The company built a telehealth platform for the treatment of children with autism, pairing behavioral health clinicians with families. The clinicians provide applied behavior analysis, which is often used to teach new behaviors or dimmish behaviors associated with autism. It is also used in the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other developmental disabilities.
AnswersNow’s clients are about 80% children and 20% parents, helping them understand ways to communicate and raise a child with autism. The company has experienced eight-fold growth since last year, Beck said, and he hopes to continue similar growth this year.
The company contracts with clinicians across the country and partners with insurers, including Medicaid, UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Cigna, Anthem and Blue Cross Blue Shield. The majority of its work is in Virginia but it is also approved to provide services in California, Texas and Georgia. Beck said the company is set to launch in several new states over the next year but declined to provide details. He said he was concerned he might offer the names of others states and then face challenges with approval from regulators.
Beck founded the company after working within the autism community and witnessing problems with care. He wanted to give families access to better trained clinicians online.
“I was disheartened and disenchanted by the way some of the services were structured,” Beck said. “It was a tiered model where the vast majority of the therapy was being delivered by a behavior tech and the requirements for that was a high school diploma.”
The company started as a Slack channel, allowing the founders to learn and iterate. It created a minimum viable product and eventually completed accelerator programs at Techstars and Lighthouse Labs. A friends-and-family funding round helped the company launch the product, and then the pandemic happened. Prior to the pandemic, insurance companies did not support telehealth treatments for children with autism.
“Prior to the pandemic, payers basically said you can’t help a kid with autism virtually,” Beck said. “We wholeheartedly disagreed, but the pandemic made them change their tune.”
As well, the company had to convince the counseling community that telehealth worked in the autism treatment field. Beck said he had to persuade several knowledgeable counselors about the benefits of AnswersNow and online counseling.
The company has 35 employees and 50 contract counselors. About 90% of the company’s services are paid through insurance.
“We have built a platform that makes the care far more engaging and meaningful,” Beck said. “It has games and activities built into the software. These are interventions that are pretty traditional.”
He said the company is focused on building the infrastructure that is needed to scale. That means hiring quality employees and continuing to build out the platform.
He said health care regulations and insurance are ongoing problem. The company is working on several partnerships with insurance companies, and Beck is hoping those will allow AnswersNow to provide greater access to the company’s platform.
“The Richmond community has been incredibly supportive of AnswersNow,” Beck said. “I don’t think we would have survived without it.”
