Mar 2, 2026 · 37 min · 11 segments
a16z Partners Daisy Wolf and Eva Steinman talk with Zach Cohen and Raymond Wang, cofounders of Ease Health, a company building an AI operating system for behavioral health that combines CRM, EHR, and…
Zach CohenGuest
Raymond WangGuest
Daisy WolfHost
Eva SteinmanHost
I think the first thing to understand is that I think when you talk to behavioral health, to most people, they think it's an Upper East Side therapist with penny loafers and mid-century modern furniture in a small room talking to you about your problems.
There's so many different levels of care inside of behavioral health, a lot of which just don't get a lot of recognition, but they're extremely important.
So you have intensive outpatient, you have partial hospitalization, you have residential care, there's different levels inside of residential care.
So I think when we talk about behavioral health, I want to make sure we're talking about the full aperture because what our software is really trying to do is service all different levels of care in terms of acuity.
And the idea is a lot of these large organizations do have kind of step up and step down facilities.
So you might go into IOP and you might be addicted to drugs and need medication assisted treatment and they might have that facility.
And obviously if it doesn't go well, you can step up to higher levels of care, hopefully step down because obviously behavioral health is a really kind of tough thing to fix and shake and continuum of care is super, super important.
So when we talk about behavioral health, that's the market that we do talk about.
And the market itself, like, I think historically just has not attracted venture capital dollars on the software kind of picks and shovels side.
And I think one reason of that is basically if you look at a good proxy for how much people will spend on their EHR, which is usually their most important piece of software.
So you look at a really big market of total healthcare services spent in behavioral health, and then you take 1% of that, it starts to get really, really small really quickly.
And the problem with that is now, because the incentives are so small, because the total addressable market isn't large, you get a bunch of bootstrap companies that eventually get bought by private equity firms.
And then the structure of the software market is basically extremely financially motivated and not motivated by better care, better software that a venture company would want to get to so they can get to that massive scale of being the de facto software player.
Behavioral health itself is also just like very... compressed from a margin perspective.
I think the first thing to understand is that I think when you talk to behavioral health, to most people, they think it's an Upper East Side therapist with penny loafers and mid-century modern furniture in a small room talking to you about your problems.
There's so many different levels of care inside of behavioral health, a lot of which just don't get a lot of recognition, but they're extremely important.
So you have intensive outpatient, you have partial hospitalization, you have residential care, there's different levels inside of residential care.
So I think when we talk about behavioral health, I want to make sure we're talking about the full aperture because what our software is really trying to do is service all different levels of care in terms of acuity.
And the idea is a lot of these large organizations do have kind of step up and step down facilities.
So you might go into IOP and you might be addicted to drugs and need medication assisted treatment and they might have that facility.
And obviously if it doesn't go well, you can step up to higher levels of care, hopefully step down because obviously behavioral health is a really kind of tough thing to fix and shake and continuum of care is super, super important.
So when we talk about behavioral health, that's the market that we do talk about.
And the market itself, like, I think historically just has not attracted venture capital dollars on the software kind of picks and shovels side.
And I think one reason of that is basically if you look at a good proxy for how much people will spend on their EHR, which is usually their most important piece of software.
So you look at a really big market of total healthcare services spent in behavioral health, and then you take 1% of that, it starts to get really, really small really quickly.
And the problem with that is now, because the incentives are so small, because the total addressable market isn't large, you get a bunch of bootstrap companies that eventually get bought by private equity firms.
And then the structure of the software market is basically extremely financially motivated and not motivated by better care, better software that a venture company would want to get to so they can get to that massive scale of being the de facto software player.
Behavioral health itself is also just like very... compressed from a margin perspective.
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