Oliva
Removing barriers of cost, access and stigma to receiving high quality mental healthcare
Company: Oliva is an employee mental wellbeing platform for companies who want to properly care for their people, and help them grow. By combining proper therapy courses, coaching, dedicated support for managers, and mental fitness classes, all led by a curated team of top professionals, Oliva helps employees respond to whatever hurdles life throws at them, both big or small, at work and beyond. All services are completely free for employees, to ensure that they can focus on getting better without the burden of payment.
HQ Location & Year Founded: Barcelona & London, 2019
Founder: Javier Suarez, Co-founder and CEO, is a serial entrepreneur whose previous startup TravelPerk has become a “unicorn” and one of the leading enterprise travel management SaaS platforms in the world. Javier is both a product and mission-driven founder, who started Oliva to help make mental healthcare more accessible and affordable for all. Previously, Javier worked on the innovation team at Booking.com. Fluent in English, Spanish and German, Javier holds degrees from Touro College Berlin and the University of Navarra in Spain.
Funds Raised and VC Investors: $8.6 million from Moonfire Ventures, Start Capital, Stride.VC and angel investors
Where did the idea for Oliva originate?
Oliva started from a personal problem. At the first company I started, I had severe anxiety around year three. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into as the company was growing bigger and I had more responsibility to shoulder. I saw five different therapists around 2018 and after a year of trying, I finally found one that clicked for me. It made no sense that I had to go through a year of hoops to find the proper mental health care that I needed.
What is the key problem that Oliva intends to solve?
There is enough science in the world on how mental healthcare can help people. What is needed is to make it more accessible in order for people to reach that existing science. Other digital mental health companies are trying to use AI to come up with new ways of treating patients. However, we don’t need new science. We need to make it easier to apply existing science.
We make it easy for employees and employers to maintain a healthy culture and wellbeing. Fifty percent of sick days are attributed to mental health. Human resource organizations develop recruitment, hiring, training and retention practices. However, companies more often than not leave their more important assets, brains, up to chance. The cost, if ignored, is massive, in terms of sick days and unproductive work time. We make it easy for organizations to implement, measure, create for employees personalized journeys for what they need.
How are you most differentiated as a service?
We are differentiated in a number of ways:
We have made in-house care the highest priority. We have a Chief Clinical Officer and a care model, not a marketplace. We want to be accountable. We take our patient-therapist matching seriously based on symptoms, as well as our care delivery. Everything is based on science. Our underlying care model brings an experienced in-house care team that is accountable for end results.We offer top quality, robust care with clinical outcomes.
We are creating a company that focuses on a robust top line as well as bottom line that will operate and continue to be successful regardless of whether we raise more money from VCs. Our company is built for the long term.
We go deep in various types of care to suit different needs, including 1-to-1, 1-to-many, self-help and we combine these to create personalized journeys.
Our brand aims to de-stigmatize mental health and to help people feel encouraged and motivated to seek care.
The mission is to have company-wide impact by offering our services to leadership, middle management and line employees alike.
What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?
Oliva has helped over 2,500 people so far in the UK, France, Germany and Spain to get the mental health care that they seek. Many of these people would not have had the budget for therapy or counseling, but we eliminate the cost friction by working with employers. In the UK, the “reliable improvement rate” for mental health patients is around 50%, however we have already delivered at 70%, well above the national average.
What lies ahead in the plans for Oliva?
We have a lot of initiatives in different stages of development. We first and foremost want to become the leading provider in Europe and the UK. We plan to double down on different types of care and modalities while maintaining a high level of reliable improvement. We are currently providing services in seven languages and plan to add three more languages per quarter. We also hope to add family members to the employer plans in the future and eventually we expect to donate free help to people who are in need.
Ron’s Take
If there is any aspect of healthcare that is in dire need of being made more affordable, more accessible and de-stigmatized all at once, it is mental healthcare. Thankfully, forward-thinking organizations are starting to realize the benefit and significance of providing mental health services to their employees. As Peter Drucker once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Without healthy mindsets and wellbeing among the individuals that make up an organization, it can be impossible to create a viable and thriving culture. Oliva is paving the way in Europe for normalizing high quality mental health as an employee benefit, open to all without respect to one’s means or job title. As services like Oliva are adopted en masse, it will become clear that we are entering a new era of companies truly putting their employees’ emotional and psychological needs in the forefront.
Disclaimer: I previously co-founded TravelPerk alongside Javier and invested with personal funds in the Pre-Seed round of Oliva in July 2021.