Recovree, a startup founded by former Minnesota Cup director Melissa Kjolsing Lynch and her brother Luke Kjolsing, has raised a $325,000 seed round to grow its platform, which aims to help those recovering from substance use disorders.
Recovree will officially go live later this month, Lynch told Minne Inno. The sister-brother startup team has been developing the project for nearly two years. They hope that Recovree becomes a valuable resource for peer support specialists, an increasingly popular, sponsor-like resource for those trying to achieve and maintain sobriety.
"It's something that's really personal to Luke and I," Lynch said. "We started having conversations with those in recovery, and asked what they really needed."
As they were getting reactions to an early prototype, Lynch said they were told that their platform could be an interesting resource for peer specialists – a role that the Recovree team wasn't initially aware of.
"It's kind of an ambiguous space because they're not diagnosing or focusing on any clinical aspect of treatment," Lynch said. "They provide empathy, support and resources – it's an important relationship piece."
Lynch and Kjolsing found that many peer specialists felt like outsiders in the nonclinical space. These specialist roles can be flexible, and often don't come with a lot of structure. Recovree wanted to find a way to enable specialists to maximize and catalog their impact by developing an efficient workflow management platform that helped specialists stay in touch with their clients (typically around 10 to 15 per specialist) and create more meaningful conversations.
The platform is free for clients to use, and each day, they log confidential, daily reflections in the portal. These reflections are then shared with their assigned peer specialist, who tracks and analyzes the data.
"It's a cool spot to be in right now. We want to make their jobs feel more impactful and help them do the work that they love," Lynch said.
Lynch and Kjolsing began piloting their platform in late 2017 with several local organizations, including Welcome Manor and Perspectives. The startup's first official user will be Minnesota Recovery Connection.
Lynch said that Recovree will use its new round of funding to grow its team and build out its platform. She declined to name Recovree's backers, but at least five people have invested in the startup, according to an SEC filing. She added that all of their current capital was raised in the Twin Cities.
Recovree is a semifinalist in the Impact Ventures division of this year's Minnesota Cup, a statewide competition from the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. It's a particularly interesting experience for Lynch, who was the director of the Cup, the state's largest startup competition, for five years. She left last fall to focus on new ventures, such as Recovree.
"It makes me so proud and happy of the work I was able to do at the Cup because it really is a phenomenal resource," Lynch said. "I also have more empathy for the companies I worked during that time. To come back and try on a new hat [as a competitor] has been a really cool experience."
In addition to running Recovree, Lynch is also the managing director of Lunar Startups, a new St. Paul-based accelerator for entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds.
Recovree has big plans for the future. While continuing to build out its current platform, the team is developing a series of updates and new features, which it plans to roll out within eight to 12 months. Eventually, Recovree hopes to expand outside of Minnesota, and possibly lend their resources to victims of the opioid crisis that's plagued the East Coast in recent years.
"There's no silver bullet for these types of issues," Lynch said. "But we can be a valuable new tool in the toolbox."
