Siblings can make good startup cofounders, like Stripe's Collison brothers. But what about a mother-daughter duo?
It’s working for Rebecca Egger and her mom Dr. Helen Egger, who cofounded virtual mental health startup Little Otter in 2020. “[T]he reason we can do this is because we've both done a lot of therapy,” Rebecca, the company’s CEO, joked.
In fact, her mother, Helen Egger, is a child psychiatrist and serves as Little Otter’s Chief Medical and Scientific Officer. Part of the inspiration for the startup, Rebecca shared, was hearing people constantly ask her mom the same question about their kids: Should I worry? “Everywhere that I went with her when people found out what she did, they would say, ‘Should I worry about my child's behavior? Is this normal? Is this not?’ And then the next question is, ‘Where do I go for help?’”
With Little Otter, Egger and her mom believe they can help parents answer that question using a combination of AI and their team of therapists, psychiatrists, and other specialists, trained in-house.
The San Francisco-based company is focused on full family care, offering mental health support services to young children, teenagers, parents, and everyone in between. To start, prospective patients schedule a kickoff session and take a mental health checkup, which evaluates all family members. From there, families are matched with a provider, and they begin sessions. Patients receive feedback after each session and retake the checkup survey every three months, giving them real insight into their progress.
Now, Fortune can exclusively report, Little Otter has raised $9.5 million in funding from investors including Pivotal Ventures, Torch Capital, Springbank, CRV, Next Legacy, G9, Gratitude Railroad, and Carrie Walton Penner through Fiore Ventures. This follows the company’s $4.2 million seed round in 2021 and $22 million Series A in 2022.
With the new funding, Egger is hoping to build out its AI triage platform. “Our original thesis has always been early identification will lead to less overall cost and less future negative impact to families,” Egger shared. According to Egger, mental health disorders can be spotted in kids as young as one year old.
23,000 families have taken Little Otter’s checkup and signed up for care services so far. And this week, the company surpassed 100,000 total care visits; 56,000 of those were completed in 2024. Putting more engineering support towards developing the company’s platform will allow Little Otter to scale its care. Currently, the company operates within the U.S. and is available to both commercial and individual clients in 14 states, plus Washington, D.C. This year, Little Otter is planning to expand more into Medicaid partnerships.
Data from initial patient screenings is used to determine the type of care a family needs and who they would be best suited to work with. All sessions are recorded, with consent from the families and providers—“[W]e're always thinking about how do we make knowledge actionable for both of these different user groups,” Egger said.
Egger sees Little Otter’s proprietary data and her and her mother’s AI expertise as a huge advantage. “[W]hat's going to be the biggest barrier to a lot of these companies is where they get their data from,” she said. She views DeepSeek’s emergence in the AI space as a real positive. "If we can do this cheaper, the better,” Egger said. “The reality is, we don't have so much data and our questions and models are significantly smaller that the cost is negligible for us right now. But with the cost reduction, I think it opens up so many more opportunities, because we can play more.”
See you in the deals,
Nina Ajemian
Email: nina.ajemian@fortune.com
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