Reya | We find your perfect therapist.

 Reya Care is an app that matches people with therapists based on their specific needs. Help us build the first version of Reya, launching in 2021.

Our market research survey shows that most people take between one and four months to find a therapist, and many say they stop looking for care because the process is long and difficult. We’ve had the same experience seeking care for ourselves, and we want to change it. Unlike the traditional approach to finding a therapist, the Reya application will leverage research, clinical expertise, and technology to reduce the pain of the search and match you with your perfect therapist. 

People seeking therapy say cost and therapeutic style are the most important factors; however this is where they struggle the most. It’s difficult to navigate insurance and know what you’ll pay and without a clinical background it’s hard to understand which of the many possible therapeutic styles is the best fit for your needs.

One of our key findings has been the urgent need for better therapist matching for Black folks, Indigenous people, and other people of color, as well as LGBTQ individuals and others with marginalized identities. Many of these users struggle to find a therapist who understands their identity and background using traditional search tools.

We know there’s a better way to find a therapist, so we are creating Reya, an app that matches people with their best-fit mental health professional. 

Our users complete a short profile of their needs, and Reya’s matching tool gives them a few personalized recommendations from our vetted group of therapists. Our matches work because we interpret users’ answers and offer them therapists based on the most important factors: cost, identity, and therapeutic style. We’re confident in this approach because since 2018, we have interviewed dozens of therapists, surveyed over 100 potential users, and matched 30+ users with therapists utilizing an early prototype.

We want to ensure we’re addressing the needs of all users, so with Reya, users can share aspects of their identity to find a therapist who understands their background. We are committed to promoting culturally conscious, trauma-informed providers to meet a diverse array of needs by:

• Vetting all participating therapists to ensure that they recognize the system of racial injustice that clients experience
• Recruiting a diverse team of clinical advisors & therapists

With your help we can launch the Reya app and help hundreds more users find their perfect therapist. 

Our founders: Arianna Robbins and Nora West met in Venture for America (a national entrepreneurship fellowship) in Philadelphia in 2015. They have focused their careers in product and project management on ensuring technology is accessible and useful to as many people as possible. Most importantly, Arianna and Nora have both personally experienced the stress and pain of searching for a therapist. They have helped family members and loved ones go through similar struggles - often when they most needed help - and realized that there has to be a better way to get mental healthcare. After two years of research and testing, they founded Reya Care to create that solution themselves.

How will we spend $15,000?

These funds will enable us to launch the Reya web application in 2021, and continue to support it for up to two years. Reya Care has already provided tools and information to our hundreds of subscribers such as how to start a search for a therapist, how to vet a potential therapist, and how to afford therapy. Building on two years of feedback and research, we plan to launch our app in 2021. 

$11,000 will support a part-time software developer working 18 hours a month to complete the Reya app development, deploy the application to users, build out additional features, and fix bugs as users identify them. 

$2,000 enables us to pay our clinical therapist advisors. Reya’s three expert advisors are certified mental health professionals with years of experience treating patients, who help us ensure that our information is as accurate and helpful as possible. We believe that time and expertise should be compensated, and want to provide our advisors a stipend for their work.

$1,500 supports the fees for hosting the web application. We’ve worked with experienced software engineers to keep the technical overhead costs as low as possible while sustainably and reliably supporting the application.

$500 supports our marketing and communications budget, primarily covering the cost of our email server and marketing website. This enables Reya to help as many people as possible access and use Reya to find a perfect therapist.

None of the crowdfunding proceeds will be used to compensate the founders.

THANK YOU!

We believe everyone should have access to great mental healthcare. Thank you so much for supporting our effort to help folks find the help they seek.