High Combinator: Startups for When Psychedelic Psychotherapy is Legal
By: Sean Mcdonald
Tags: Psychedelics, Ycombinator, Startup

Medical Technologies / “MedTech”

ConnecToMe

CRM for Psychedelic Psychotherapy Practitioners.

Ultimately, service providers are still businesses and need to provide excellent care with full document compliance and traceability, as well as provider portal features to be able to manage Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning (and Procurement). Eventually, we’ll offer newsletters and other marketing tools.

Promise Capital

Financial instruments for restructured mental health insurance contracts.

At PC, we propose a new thesis: psychedelics will radically reduce the long term mental health costs for some segments of insurance customers and prior to their intervention we can buy portfolios of worst performing customer policies and flip them to be the highest performin. For example, transformational psychedelic psychotherapy that reduces risk of suicidality and associated medical costs. We are attempting to bundle people in these risk groups into financial instrument that can be “flipped” from a high risk low profit to a low risk high profit bundle of insurance contracts, using a relatively low cost psychedelic therapy. A profit-draining customer becomes a profit-making customer. We help investors invest in that, at large scale.

Chasm Bridge Labs

Product and Process Design Lab

We help psychedelics cross the proverbial chasm by developing the tools that help emerging psychedelic psychotherapy companies connect to the mainstream medical infrastructure. Our first series of design labs will bring together corporate and startup leaders to build an open source billing code synchronization API.

Real Estate

Birch

Birch is “AirBNB for intentional communities.”

At Birch, people can bring groups of 15–150 people to an enhanced agricultural facility — a family farm, so to speak — and have the infrastructure to host camps, workshops, and spiritual events. Traditionally, these communities would own and barely use the site; in our platform model, it’s busy all year round, because during off times, the locations are used as psychedelic healing centers.

Safe Safe Space

Convert vacation rentals into psychedelic healing centers.

To effectively meet the massive demand that will soon emerge for legal psychedelic pyschotherapy, locations will have to be available quickly. People want nature based experiences with privacy, which is a core niche of highly profitable AirBNB rentals throughout the world. We provide a separate insurance policy that makes the safe space safe for the hosts, offering policy, procedures, and insurance coverage that allows an AirBNB to temporarily be a healing center. This will allow exponential growth in availability of space from leveraged capital.

Lifestlye

Wilderness Journey

Safe, guided, outdoor medicine work journeys. (Psychedelic camping trips!)

WJ combines nature, healing, equine therapy, and psychedelic psychotherapy. Our team combines both healing arts, ranching, wilderness first responders, and chefs. We offer a premium service with a one week journey that includes healing, and a fifty mile horseback journey. We offer everything from working out rage by chopping down trees, to long days by creeks with a horse and a dog. WJ serves wild sourced and indigenous foods, only.

LifeQuest

Life Management Software in the Personal Legend model.

We make it possible to manage your life like a video game. You can break life into challenges, levels, and quests. We help you think about something like going to work or to college not based on the cultural mythology that is readily available, but on your personal legend. Our AI system breaks huge challenges into daily tasks, and essentially turns your real life goals into a game format. Will you win?

Integrated Portraits

Thoughtful portraiture and photobooths as a tool for personal growth.

Integrated Portraits is developing tools and services that enable the custom crafted self-portrait to be personally and culturally significant in new ways. In the age of the selfie, why don’t we have extraordinary photos that help us be the person we want to be? Why don’t we commemorate moments with amazing portraits instead of fast selfies? Our studio offers everything from Bah Mitzvah portraits to end of life portraits. We make every single portrait amazing, both in the creative process and the outcomes. We offer free before and after psychedelic psychotherapy portraits for veterans with purple hearts.

PsiloCycling

Microdosing + spin class.

We are a unique spin studio where we combine yoga, meditation, spin class…and microdosing. Under careful guidance with innovative new (patent pending) safety equipment, we allow you to push your body and your mind at the same time. We see enormous gains in flexibility and VO2 max when people are able to control their minds. Whether its performance or weight loss, PsiloCycling can give you the edge you’ve been looking for. You might not be surprised that we end up being a community center as much as a gym. Try a free intro class today!

Health & Wellness

CatDog

AI driven voice guide and DJ for self guided medicine work.

CatDog is Siri for medicine work — an AI powered tool that self-guiding medicine users can use to guide them in real time. Whether microdoser or home therapy user, CatDog first learns from hundreds of questions you answer about your preferences, then is there for you while you do your work. CatDog can be both like a cat, and leave you alone for the most part, or like a Dog, and proactively guide you. Eventually, CatDog will connect with telemedicine to be able to call out for extra support, as needed. CatDog can record and transcribe your whole journey, or operate in privacy mode and leave no trace. You can try a guided 2-hour journey for free on our website.

Psychedelic Dojo

A dignified approach to psychedelic self work.

For people familiar with the philosophical and intellectual traditions connected to the history of martial arts — especially but not exclusively Chinese and Japanese arts — there is an obvious connection between psychedelic awakening and the emergence of masterful powers in martial arts. We believe that the martial arts approach is the right way to learn psychedelics. You start with a white belt in microdosing, and one day you can handle hero’s journeys and have read in depth about science, philosophy, spirituality, and the pro’s and con’s of psychedelics. We have locations with programmed events, content, and branded apparel.

Spiritual / Neo Spiritual

Big Tree

Build your own church-like community with an app and events.

App and event platform that offers a new alternative to “church.” Big Tree is based on Journeys where each user can self-guide in a spiritual discovery and self-awareness journey, then find other users in similar stages of the journey. We will eventually grow into a content platform and merchandise brand. Everything we do is predicated on a simple belief: we are all one thing. DNA is one big tree.

Sacred Technologies

Musical instruments and visual expression tools for psychedelic practitioners.

As people wake up to the reality that we are emergent consciousness crafted from stardust and sunlight, we realize we need new tools to appreciate ourselves. Spiritual communion with the divine can be as simple as holding a prism to the sun to get a hidden rainbow in your hand. We build tools that bring people together in reverent ways, using physics to spark wonder. Our prisms are just the beginning. Human-scale theremins for biofeedback, group frequency feedback resonators for chanting, and fireside magic potions all to come.

Psychedelic Sanctuary

Safe places for religious leaders to find psychedelic truths.

For some, psychedelics — entheogens — are deeply spiritual. Many people who are deeply spiritual or religious openly accept these medicines as creating legitimate and profound experiences. For those people, we offer a safe space and a network of experienced, educated, and certified religious service practitioners. Ranging from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic services to neo-shamanic and even admiring atheist, our location and platform offer a safe space to blend psychedelics and spiritual practice. We offer everything from a pipe organ to pow-wow drums.

Strategic / Cultural / Nonprofit

Americans for Americans

Advocacy group to transcend politics regarding psychedelics. Safe places for religious leaders to find psychedelic truths.

AfA is a full cultural spectrum lobbying organization, promoting safe access to psychedelics and associated industries. We’re proud to say all members of the initial cohort have agreed to join as charter members. AfA lobbies based on the shared interests of all our cultural groups, from conservatives terrified of opioids in their communities, to spiritual progressives. Our positions are published in papers that have been reviewed by both conservative and liberal think tanks.

Doors & Portals Board Game Company

Games to acculturate people of all ages to psychedelics.

With a nod to our elders who made classics like Chutes and Ladders, we launch Doors & Portals Board Game Company. At D&P, we recognize that a new generation of parents is emerging who will describe psychedelics, cannabis, and other formerly taboo things as valuable and societally important. We use that understanding to design board games that allow a new generation of parents to teach kids about healthy, healing, and holistic use of plant medicines. We help parents persuade kids to wait until it’s medically healthy to use these medicines.

Messia.Nick

Compassionately help people out of messiah holes in psychedelic work.

An outcome of psychedelic healing that is recognized in our community’s humor — but not in our infrastructure — is that some people feel a massive complex after doing healing work. Some of that classifies as messianic, and most of it is harmless. Our content platform and guided app revolves around the story of Nick, a guy who did trauma healing and decided he would open a retreat center in Oregon the next day. Nick goes on to learn a healthy way to integrate this experience and meaningfully contribute to others’ healing.

Integrated Politics Foundation

Lobby for lessons learned in medicine work.

IPF exists to host processes that offer a third path in our political economy. We bring together a variety of experts and ask them to use MDMA to find ways to work together. A great example is our pilot project, bringing together conservative, Republican hunters and liberal, Democrat vegans for a guided MDMA session on a large agricultural tract going into public trust. At the end of the session, both sides supported the initiatives of the other and found a way to make hunting rights and community garden rights locked in for 100 years. We hope you’ll read our inaugural report, Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In: How Psychedelics and Civic Responsibility Go Hand in Hand.