A young girl was having an asthma attack at a children's hospital in Boston where he was a medical student, and she wasn't responding well to other treatments. David Spiegel knew exactly what to do.
As her parents watched, Spiegel guided the girl through the process of hypnosis and within five minutes the attack was over. Hypnosis did what medication hadn't.
Many years later, Spiegel, 76, is a Harvard-trained doctor and psychiatrist who has been teaching psychiatry at Stanford since 1975. Both of his parents were psychiatrists as well.
His father used hypnosis with soldiers during World War II to help them manage pain and stress from combat.
He co-founded Reveri in 2021 with Ariel Poler, 55, a longtime investor and entrepreneur, to bring self-hypnosis mainstream.
The Bay Area startup announced a $1.8 million seed round today that was led by InReach Ventures and also included Background Capital and several angel investors. Today the company also announced the hiring of Massimo De Marco, previously CTO of London-based Depop, as CEO and Bradley Lautenbach, formerly the head of commercial marketing at The Washington Post, as SVP of marketing.
Spiegel and Poler both said they have used hypnosis on themselves, too.
After undergoing surgery in 1972 for shoulder dislocation, Spiegel used hypnosis to moderate the pain receptors in his body and says it allowed him to avoid any use of pain killers — neither over-the-counter nor prescription — during his recovery.
Spiegel has been a psychiatrist for more than four decades and has co-authored many research clinical research studies including one published in 2000 in the journal Lancet that showed beneficial outcomes for reducing pain during invasive medical procedures. Hypnosis could be used to reduce or shorten the use of anesthetic drugs during surgeries and the recovery from them, the study found.
"Structured attention and self-hypnotic relaxation proved beneficial during invasive medical procedures. Hypnosis had more pronounced effects on pain and anxiety reduction," the study's abstract says.
While most people probably won’t go to such an extreme (and even then only under strict medical supervision), Reveri provides guided sessions to help people perform self-hypnosis for common conditions like anxiety, stress, insomnia and pain that can be safely treated at home.
Users are guided through sessions that can last for as little as one minute or up to 15 minutes, and the app can adjust a session based on audio feedback. All voice interactions are processed locally on a user's device and nothing is shared to remote data centers, the company says.
"The thing that scares people about hypnosis, you know, the guy made a fool of me on the stage with hypnosis… that's a bad use of it and I don't like those things," Spiegel told me. "The point is that you tend not to judge, you tend to experience rather than judge things."
The app is available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis, currently priced at $11.99 or $49.99, respectively; a lifetime membership is $99.99. A single private hypnosis session with Spiegel in his clinic could cost as much as $350, he told me, and he now recommends the app to his private patients as a way to supplement their sessions with him.
Reveri's headcount is about a dozen people and the company wants to at least double that. Spiegel will continue to oversee hypnosis content and direction, as well as voice the guided sessions in the app, and Poler will head up business and strategy.
