WoW Woman in HealthTech | Elettra Bianchi Dennerlein, CEO of My Online Therapy

Interview by Anja Streicher

One in four people in the UK will struggle with their mental health in any given year, according to the UK charity Mind.

My online therapy, the UK’s first virtual psychology clinic, which provides people with easy access to psychological therapies by connecting them with leading psychologists via video or web chat aims to help people with their mental health. After completing a free online assessment, the platform matches the user to the most appropriate therapeutic approach and the best psychologist for their situation. The user can choose to follow this recommendation or from any of the psychologist profiles on the platform. 

We talked to Elettra Bianchi Dennerlein, Co-Founder and CEO of My Online Therapy to find out more about the story behind My Online Therapy. Elettra will be joining us as a panelist on our event From Founder’s Perspective: Tech for women, by women next week. Find out more about the event and get your ticket here.

Elettra, could you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and the story behind My Online Therapy. 

Environmental activist, turned Tesla sales advisor, turned mental health entrepreneur. My mission is to make a difference in one of the two causes I support: mental health and climate change. Fresh out of an MSc at Imperial in Environmental Technology I joined Tesla - arguably the largest start-up in the world, and strengthened the bones of the hustler! I met my first investor whilst working at Tesla, and within a couple of weeks, off the back of a napkin business plan, I had raised a pre-seed round to build my own company! Of course, two years ago I had no idea where I was going! I came up with the idea of an online platform for remote mental health consultations after going through the experience myself. When I moved to the UK from Italy I was already seeing a therapist, and rather than starting from scratch I asked her to take it over Skype. Fast forward five years, I was looking into the digital health space to understand what the market already offered and spotted a gap in delivering quality consultations remotely. 

We began to talk (and do) more about mental health, finally! People are starting to realise that health is not just physical health, but mental health as well.  Tell us more about how My online therapy works, what are some of the benefits, and what has been the feedback from the community so far. 

Indeed. We can finally say that the western world is on the right path towards destigmatization of mental health and this is helping define and set the tone for the conversations and agendas both on a strategic level and in the granular realities of society. 

My Online Therapy is a cross-platform app (iOS, Android and Web) that helps people find the right therapist for their needs and begin a therapeutic journey via video conferencing, live chat or daily coaching. Finding help that suits our specific needs is one of the hardest challenges people go through when looking for therapy. At My Online Therapy, we have taken the proven model of our partner and one of the most successful clinics in London, The Chelsea Psychology Clinic, to translate the manual matching system they have into an algorithm that helps people find the most suitable psychologist for their needs. In a matter of minutes, My Online Therapy matches you to a clinical psychologist and you can book a consultation as soon as within the next five hours. I am really proud because feedback on the app has been awesome! 

You recently raised $4.2 million. First and foremost, congratulations to the entire team. What was it like starting a business for you? How did your fundraising journey look like? What was the most challenging thing so far in your entrepreneurial journey? 

Thank you!I have to say that I had no idea I was starting a business, or what that really meant, until quite later on when I actually realised I had people working on my idea and turning it into a reality. My fundraising journey began as a result of a lucky encounter. As a friend always reminds me, I have quite the Silicon Valley story (or the London version of it). I was working at Tesla when I met my first investor at my mum's birthday dinner and within a year of our first meeting, he bought a car and invested in my company. 

I thought to myself: "Oh great! I can do this fundraising business with my eyes closed!" Turns out, it does NOT work exactly like that. After the first raise, I quickly managed to get a team together and start the build of the app. I focused only on development and not on sales or bringing in business, and burned through the pre-seed capital faster than business was growing. We then had to go out for more money but we were not ready, as the product had not been out long enough, and we could not show enough traffic. 2019 was a really tough year. Letting people go, asking for swat equity, investing capital myself. Proving to the world that we were here to offer something good and finding the capital to get backed seemed impossible. I faced a lot of NOs. Thankfully, with the help of our first investor, we managed to pull together a pool of other investors and secure a great end to 2019!

What's one piece of advice you would give to a startup founder? 

Surround yourself with people and colleagues who know more than you. Don't be afraid of being the least knowledgeable person in the room. 

 In your opinion, what's next for health tech? Where do you see the industry going and what will be some of the trends in the upcoming years? What's next for My online therapy? 

I think that the shift towards personalised healthcare we are witnessing combined with people taking control of their health will result in various digital health technologies and self-diagnostics tools coming together, to build layers of data, that AI will help codify and make sense of. To me, personalised health in the future means a truly holistic and integrated outlook of our health. So that our blood test kits need to speak to our gut test kits to our mental health diagnostics tools etc. An AI layer on top of that will be able to bring together all the data sets to assess and recommend outputs that are based on every aspect of our health. 

At least this is what I would like to see happening. :-) (I am a bit of a kit test geek!)

What's the best thing about your job? 

Never knowing what tomorrow will bring! 

Follow My Online Therapy:

Website: https://myonlinetherapy.com/

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This interview was conducted by Anja Streicher, Chief Marketing Officer of Women of Wearables. She is passionate about women's health, supporting women in business and is still trying to figure out how to balance motherhood and business.