- Field Trip Psychedelics raised $8.5 million to build out a network of clinics for psychedelic-assisted therapies.
- While the psychedelic medicine industry is nascent, the research is promising - and investors are chasing what could be the next hot trend in healthcare.
- We got the pitch deck that Field Trip used to raise the money. Check it out below.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Once relegated to patchouli-scented dorm rooms and late nights at jam-band festivals, psychedelic drugs are experiencing something of a renaissance as a serious form of therapy for a litany of mental health issues.
The research, though in early stages, is so promising that psychedelic-based therapies are quickly becoming one of the hottest emerging areas of healthcare. There's a wave of startups working on developing FDA-approved drugs from compounds like psilocybin, one of the chief active ingredients in magic mushrooms, and various compounds in ibogaine, a naturally occurring hallucinogen, among others.
And like any new, exciting trend - VCs are racing to cash in.
To that end, Toronto-based Field Trip Psychedelics recently closed an $8.5 million Series A funding round to build out a series of clinics for psychedelic therapies, first in Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles. The company also hopes to complete what it calls the world's first legal cultivation facility for psilocybin-containing mushrooms at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.
Field Trip plans to open clinics where people can one day get treated with psychedelics
Field Trip was launched last year with the idea of being a venture fund, but that plan was quickly shelved as the founders began to understand the realities of the psychedelic market.
"We put the idea of being a venture fund on the shelf and doubled down on our own operations," said Field Trip Executive Chairman Ronan Levy.
He said the first three clinics will provide psychedelic assistance and psychotherapy procedures to patients, and Field Trip aims to open roughly 50 to 60 clinics across North America by 2023.
The clinics will start with ketamine-enhanced therapy for patients with depression. Ketamine is a semi-psychedelic drug that's used as a surgical anesthetic, and also for depression that hasn't responded to other treatments. A depression treatment based on ketamine was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last year.
The clinics will add other treatments as research moves forward, and Levy said he hopes some of that research will be conducted at Field Trip's facility in Jamaica. Field Trip will also partner with other startups working on FDA approvals for use in its network of clinics.
"We intentionally crafted our business model to be complementary to just about everybody working in the psychedelic sphere right now," Levy said.
Cannabis VCs invested in Field Trip
They're going to need clinics and trained practitioners to administer the drugs they're working on, which Field Trip will provide once its network is up-and-running.
The Series A round was led by Field Trip's founders and the Singhal Health Foundation, as well as notable investors from the cannabis industry including Subversive Capital, Silver Spike Capital, and the VC firm Bolt. The company declined to disclose a valuation.
Levy told Business Insider in an interview that investors he spoke with during the fundraising process were "very receptive" towards psychedelics.
"I think that was in part due to all the progress made in cannabis in the last five-to-seven years, but also because the scientific advances in terms of psychedelics have been pretty well communicated across a large swath of the population, and particularly the investor base," he said.
"A big part of our focus was Silicon Valley-based VCs, so just given the cultural acceptance of the use of psychedelics for optimization and performance purposes among that group, there wasn't that much of an education curve," he added.
Levy said the fundraising process took a little under four months to close, relatively quick for a Series A round in an emerging industry.
Getting past the psychedelic stigma
Levy said it was easy to move past the stigma around psychedelic drugs in conversations with investors. He said he had to explain that "psychedelics are inherently non-addictive and the evidence about therapeutic uses is well-established, and then "most people's reservations about psychedelics are removed."
Levy said what attracted investors to Field Trip is that the company is not focused exclusively on drug development and the "binary outcomes" that come with that process.
"We're looking at building a business that complements all of the other work going on," says Levy, highlighting other startups like ATAI and Compass Pathways that are working on developing FDA-approved psychedelic drugs.
Levy said that while there are other startups working on removing the molecules from psychedelic that actually remove the psychedelic experience while maintaining the pharmacological agent, Field Trip's "core belief structure" is that the psychedelic experience is an essential part of the "therapeutic outcome."
Take a look at the deck Field Trip used to raise $8.5 million below:
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