St. Petersburg-based telehealth therapy startup LunaJoy Health raised an additional $4.2 million in April.
The startup provides online therapy for mothers in more than a dozen states. The capital will help the company reach new markets and overhaul its growth plans.
Co-founder Dr. Shama Rathi told Tampa Bay Inno that the funding comes ahead of schedule. The startup had succeeded revenue and metric goals from a seed funding round, a $2.4 million raise in 2023 from undisclosed investors.
The founders began considering a formal Series A raise but were fortunate to receive capital from investors in less than a month, Rathi said. This saved the firm six months of split focus on raising a funding round.
"We were able to skip that round and go back to being able to capture that growth," Rathi said.
The startup saw strong demand from hospitals and providers and wanted to focus on operations. The company had more than two years of runway left before this latest raise, so the new funding has added velocity to LunaJoy's development, Rathi said.
The funding comes from the California venture groups, including Founders X Fund, Goodwater Capital, Magic Fund, North South Ventures and prominent accelerator program Y-Combinator. It also saw participation from Dubai-based VentureSouq and Wilmington, Delaware-based venture firm Nurture Ventures.
"LunaJoy Health's mission to bring a new standard to maternal health care for Medicaid aligns perfectly with our goal of supporting scalable solutions to the world's most pressing challenges," Surbhi Sarna, a partner at Y Combinator, said in a statement.
LunaJoy has been efficient at raising millions in venture capital while based in St. Petersburg, Rathi said. That has been partly because of the welcoming and supportive community here.
"Compared to places like New York and San Francisco, where someone has a startup at every single corner, this is very different," Rathi said. "So much of our growth and traction has come from being able to get straight to the top in a place like Tampa."
The company is an alumnus of the Tampa Bay Wave accelerator programs.
Dr. Sipra Laddha and Rathi founded LunaJoy in 2021 after nearly a decade of practicing psychiatry. It later graduated from the winter batch of Y-Combinator startups in 2022.
