Hi friend,
Capital moves to the storytellers. The ones who can tell a compelling narrative about the future and why their business will succeed.
In fundraising, your pitch is your story. So what does a great pitch look like for a mental health business in 2026?
There are some general things all founders need to get right when pitching — the internet is full of helpful tips on this topic, and I’ve included the best resources in the notes.1
But there are also elements of a great pitch that are highly specific to mental health. These take into account the nature of the market in 2026 and the experience of the investors who will be listening to your pitch,
Finding that specific advice is much harder, which is why I’ve written this post. After reviewing hundreds of decks and speaking to several founders and investors, this post captures the top tips I’ve learned for pitching your mental health business in 2026.
Let’s get into it.
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Key Takeaways;
Pitch your business first, impact second
Keep your personal story short
Be different. Don’t fall into the sea of sameness in mental health
Address the "mental health is a niche" objection upfront
Prove beyond doubt that there is a willingness to pay
SHOW ME THE OUTCOMES. Include validated outcomes
Don't be afraid to estimate
Show your ABZ plan for commercial success
Keep it simple
Take away their reasons to say no
Up your confidence
1. Pitch your business first, impact second
Many mental health pitches start with the social problem. They show statistics about the impact of mental illness and explain how their idea will solve it. That's great. But it's a mistake.
Investors don't give you money because they care about the problem (even if they do actually care). They give you money because they believe you'll generate a financial return.
I learned this from Tim Ferriss at the One Mind Accelerator earlier this year. Tim has seen thousands of startup pitches, including many from mental health founders. He says that founders should pitch the business first, and the societal impact second. The reason someone should care is not the same as the reason they should invest.
So start your pitch by showing that you have a genuinely compelling business opportunity. Convince investors that your company can become a great investment. Then bring in the societal impact as the cherry on top.
Stephen Murdoch, an investor, shared his thoughts on this: "Compassion might get you a meeting, but unit economics and clinical credibility that produce measurable outcomes get you funded."
Also, if someone is going to care about the impact, they'll care after one or two slides. Any additional slides on social impact are redundant, so get rid of them.
Yes, mental health is an important problem. Yes, investors care about it. Yes, your solution might genuinely improve people's lives. But your pitch should lead with the investment case, not the impact case.
2. Keep your personal story short
On a similar note, you must make sure your personal story doesn’t dominate your pitch. Many founders start a mental health business because of their personal experience. While that story shows a passion for the problem, it has a limited effect in convincing investors to fund your business. Keep your personal story short and do not let it be the centrepiece of your pitch. Your main pitch should be about your business, the specific problem it’s solving, how you’ll get paid to solve that problem and why you’ll be a giant company one day.
3. Be different
There is a sea of sameness in mental health right now. You cannot fall into it. Investors are seeing hundreds of pitches, and in the mental health space, many of them look the same.
As we outlined in a piece with the One Mind Accelerator earlier this year, AI chatbots and teletherapy are particularly saturated areas of innovation right now. While there may still be room for good companies to get funded here, your pitch must clearly communicate why you are different to all the other companies that investors have seen.
Having a truly unique view of the problem, or a unique product to solve it, is a great way to show differentiation. But it is not the only way. You can differentiate on your commercial model (how you get paid and by whom), or through your distribution (how you reach buyers and users). Perhaps you’ll differentiate on how you actually operate your organisation. I’m still waiting to see a pitch for a mental health company that applies AI within their business to operate at much lower costs to incumbents. I think this is one way an aggregator business could reach >10% net margins in 2026.
You must realise that mental health is now a crowded and competitive market. And it’s not just your business that must be differentiated; your actual pitch must be too. Remember, investors are seeing hundreds of pitches, so you need a way to stand out.
Communicate your unique point of view on the market and have a unique story to tell. Avoid including generic mental health slides. Don’t open your pitch with a slide on the prevalence of mental disorders. Or even worse, the economic cost of mental illness. Firstly, these statistics are irrelevant to the commercial success of your business. And secondly, they are in every other mental health pitch deck!
I’ve found that the best pitches teach the investor something. They give them an interesting insight to consider and make them feel smart.
One way to test if your pitch is unique is to go to each slide and ask yourself, ‘Could this slide be in someone else’s pitch deck?’ If yes, kill it.
4. Address the “mental health is a niche” objection upfront
Many investors still see mental health as a niche, and one too small to justify venture returns. This is particularly true for generalist investors. You need to address this objection early in your pitch and punt it so far out of the room that it’s no longer an issue. To do so, give them some hard numbers on the size of the specific market that you will operate in.
The mental health market is huge and growing — in 2021, more than $140B was spent on mental health and substance use disorder care in the US. Today, that number is higher (if you can find a reputable source, include it). But more specifically, find the part of the market that you will be fully able to address, show how large it is, why it will grow and why you’ll be able to capture a large part of it.
Also, there are now multiple mental health unicorns, many with annual revenues in excess of $1B. And yet, each only holds a single-digit percentage of market share.
One helpful way to remove this objection is by comparing the mental health market size to another market that investors are already convinced is large — the global ride-sharing market (the arena of Uber, Lyft, Didi and more) is approx. $170B.
5. Prove beyond doubt that there is a willingness to pay
Perhaps the most important part of your mental health pitch is proving to investors that someone will pay for your solution.
Joshua Chauvin, Venture Partner at Awareness Capital, feels strongly about this. “In digital health, the graveyard is full of companies with strong products and no proof anyone would pay”.
Investors are highly aware of this, and so the best mental health pitches answer the commercial question before they have to ask it. As Chauvin explains, “The best pitches are laser-focused on proving willingness to pay early, because everything else follows from it. Including comments like ‘we interviewed prospective buyers, and they’d be interested’ isn’t evidence — a signed pilot with a named budget holder who is committed to putting skin in the game, is.”
Max Rollwage, Co-Founder of Fault Line doubles down on this. He explains that to raise capital, you will need to show that you deeply understand the buyer landscape and can show why they will choose your solution. “Unless you have an extremely crisp articulation for why your buyer will benefit from adopting you, it will be difficult to raise.”
Rollwage adds, “the reason of ‘better patient care’ is usually not a good enough answer as adoption might depend on so many other factors”. Show the incentives of the different parties in your ecosystem, especially your buyers, and exactly how your solutions satisfy those incentives.
FamilyWell is a great example of this. They integrate their behavioural health solution into OBGYN practices. Why do they get adopted? Because their solution actually makes money for the OBGYN practice by allowing them to bill for collaborative care.
6. SHOW ME THE OUTCOMES
Being able to deliver superior outcomes is a competitive advantage in today's crowded mental health market, and investors care about that.
As Stephen Murdoch explains, “investors need evidence that you’ve found a repeatable way to improve outcomes while building a durable business”.
Show this by including hard data on validated outcome measures. We wrote an entire article on this topic with Jen Huberty, PhD, which explains exactly which validated outcomes investors are looking for at each stage and how you can collect them.
Including hard outcome data is one of the best ways to separate your pitch from others. They increase credibility, show the validity of your solution and signal that you are serious about creating measurable impact.
If Jerry Maguire were a mental health investor, he’d be screaming, “SHOW ME THE OUTCOMES.”
7. Don’t be afraid to estimate
Mental health founders are often hesitant to provide estimations. Many come from clinical or scientific backgrounds where it’s unusual to make approximations with uncertain assumptions. In startups, you rarely have perfect data. However, you still need to give answers to investors. You can’t tell them that you’re not sure what your growth rate will be or how much money you expect to burn. They want certainty, and you need to give it to them by providing clear answers. That requires making estimations, and you should not be afraid of this.
For example, you may not yet know what your actual unit economics are. But you cannot tell that to an investor. You will need to estimate what they will be. To do this, use a logical approach and set of assumptions that you would be comfortable defending if an investor probed.
Investors are smart and know that your projections likely won’t come true. But they need to see that you’ve thought deeply about them. The only thing worse than an estimated answer is no answer at all.
8. Show your ABZ plan for commercial success
When an investor is listening to your pitch, they’re asking themselves, “Can this be a billion-dollar company?” You must communicate with clarity and confidence why you will be. This is the “Z” part of your plan, the final destination, and you must communicate it in a way where it seems like a foregone conclusion.
However, there is another element to your commercial viability that many mental health founders miss - what you will do to succeed in the next 12 months. This is the “A-B” part of your plan.
Max Rollwage, Co-Founder and CEO of Fault Line shared this tip with me. He said, “Be very specific about two points related to commercial viability. First, how will you be a $1B-$100B company in 10 years? And second, how will you create sufficient revenue for the next raise in 1 year?”
He emphasised that you need to provide detail in this commercial plan, not just hand-wavey projections based on capturing X% of the TAM.
“You probably want very specific bottom-up unit economics and, very importantly, a good understanding of the market dynamics and incentives of buyers that would help or hinder you in your adoption.”
8. Keep it simple
They can love you, they can hate you, but they cannot be confused by you. This is another gem I picked up from Tim Ferriss.
Many mental health solutions can be complex, but if your investor is confused by it, they won’t invest in it. They might even recognise that it could be a great idea, but they’ll put it in what Warren Buffett calls the ‘too hard’ bucket, and politely pass on your deal.
Your challenge is to condense everything you know about your business into a single-threaded, easily understood narrative. There must be one thread that ties together the problem, the solution and the commercial plan.
One big mistake I see in pitch decks is strategic hedging. This happens when founders pitch a wide range of options for where they can take the business. They say things like “we will start by selling to private-practice clinicians, but if that doesn’t work, we could also sell to community mental health organisations, or maybe even health systems.” This hedging just portrays a lack of conviction in your main plan. And lack of conviction is instant death in a pitch.
You must keep your pitch simple.
As Joshua Chauvin describes, “the best pitches are ruthlessly simple: no more than 10 slides, and probably 90% fewer words than you think you need.” I can’t emphasise this enough, please cut words from your slides. And, don’t include more than one chart on a page.
Long decks full of words and multiple charts muddy the message. As Chauvin explains, “A dense deck signals a founder who can’t distil their own business.” Not only does that make it harder for investors to evaluate your idea, but it signals that you will have trouble communicating it to other stakeholders, like customers, partners and employees in the future.
10. Take away their reasons to say no
Before founding Hemingway, I worked at a Fintech startup where we raised over $200M. The founder of that business gave me some great advice when it came to pitching investors. He told me, “Instead of giving them reasons to say yes, just take away all their reasons to say no.”2
So why would a mental health investor say no? Many of the reasons we have already discussed in this article. They might say the market isn’t big enough or that they don’t believe your unit economics are good enough. They might say that they don’t think you are differentiated enough or may not believe you have a buyer who will pay for your solution.
As you are crafting your pitch and testing it with people (because you should be testing it), write down the reasons an investor would say no. Then, address these objections in your pitch.
11. Up Your Confidence
My experience is that founders from other industries (like Fintech or SAAS) pitch with much more confidence than the average mental health founder. I’ve seen many bad ideas raise money from such overconfident founders. You can learn from this.
Investors want to feel confident in their decision to give you money, and being highly confident in your own business and your own pitch will rub off on them. So make sure you have an idea and a plan that you deeply believe in. Get people to poke holes in it and then fill those holes. And once that’s done, deliver your pitch with the supreme confidence of a twenty-year-old Stanford dropout with an AI startup.
That’s all for this week. Many thanks to Max Rollwage, Stephen Murdoch, Augusta Peytz and Joshua Chauvin for their contributions to this report.
Got another tip you’ve found useful when pitching? Please share it with me. My aim is to provide content that is helpful for people innovating in mental health, so contributions are always welcome.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Steve
Founder of Hemingway
Notes:
[1] These are the best general resources for fundraising and pitching:
[2] I think he learned this from an episode of Billions, but it’s good advice all the same.
[3] I know that raising venture funding is not for everyone. I will be sharing more guides soon for those who can’t / don’t want to raise funding in this way. Just keep an eye on your emails!
