Hi friend,

I believe in entrepreneurship as a vehicle for change.

Our existing treatments and care models are not enough to address the suffering we see in society today. We desperately need innovation, and much of this innovation will be driven by entrepreneurs.

Mental health entrepreneurship faces many challenges. There are tensions across the ecosystem that act as sand in the wheels of progress.

On the most basic level, founders want to move fast. Health systems and regulators don’t always share this enthusiasm for speed. Founders also desire a level of scale that often conflicts with the need for individualised care. Companies feel slowed down by regulators. Regulators worry that innovation is moving faster than their ability to understand its risks.

Companies need to grow and improve margins. Clinicians feel threatened by technology or exploited by businesses. Payers struggle to trust companies. Researchers get annoyed by companies moving ahead of the evidence, while companies see traditional research as too slow for the pace of technology.

You get the gist.

And while you may not agree with some of these positions, dismissing the tensions would be a mistake. They are real, and they drive the behaviour of people you need to collaborate with to succeed.

In this report, we discuss how APA Labs and the Inside the Lab event are addressing these tensions (and how you can get involved).

This is a sponsored post. If you’d like to understand more about my approach to working with sponsors and my criteria for doing so, you can read about it here.

An ecosystem progresses when each stakeholder can understand these tensions. When they can see the incentives of different parties and, importantly, what human desires, fears and conditioning lie underneath their behaviours.

With this understanding, individuals can build bridges and find common ground. And on this common ground, the whole field can shuffle forward, improving the lot of each stakeholder — and most importantly, the patient.

So who is capable of resolving such tensions? Each individual stakeholder is acting rationally, in alignment with their own interests, and few have the capacity or incentive to solve any of these challenges.

A third party is needed.

I like to think Hemingway can play a small role in this. By offering a third-party, objective assessment of the ecosystem and by bringing people together through our community, we can break down some of these barriers.

But despite our growth, we are still small.

Someone like the American Psychological Association, however, is not small.

Over the last eighteen months, I’ve gotten to know the folks at APA Labs, a new initiative from the American Psychological Association focused on mental health innovation. They are well positioned to address these tensions and can use their scale, credibility and convening power to bring stakeholders together.

We partnered with them last year on their annual event, Inside the Lab. A lot of folks from the Hemingway Community went, and I’ve heard great feedback. Many are going back again this year.

Next month, APA Labs is hosting the 2026 version of the event — Inside the Lab 2026 in Austin. It's a hands-on, collaborative event (think more workshops than speeches) where a variety of stakeholders come together to address the tensions of innovating in mental health.

If you want to get involved, you can get a 20% discount on your ticket as a Hemingway Reader. Just use the code ITL2026WFOOY when signing up.

Let me explain a bit about APA Labs, what they do, how they are tackling these tensions and what you can expect from the Inside the Lab event next month.

What is APA Labs?

The American Psychological Association (APA) has been around since 1892. As the mental health space has evolved, so has the APA. Through its Office of Healthcare Innovation and Scientific Affairs Office, it’s been actively involved in digital mental health. They’ve assembled expert committees on mental health tech and measurement-based care, and led efforts on regulatory standards, reimbursement, interoperability, consumer protections, and more.

In the last few years, leaders at the APA recognised that mental health innovation was becoming an increasingly important part of mental healthcare, and they saw opportunities to use their expertise and assets to help make an impact. Specifically, they wanted to expand how APA engaged with the emerging players in the mental health tech ecosystem.

In February 2025, APASI (American Psychological Association Services, Inc., a companion organisation to APA) launched APA Labs to address this gap.

APA Labs was designed to be a more flexible, entrepreneurial arm of the association that could interact directly with innovators. Its purpose is to help ensure that new products in mental health are developed with attention to evidence, ethics, and clinical insight, while also supporting practical pathways to adoption. The APA has substantial scientific expertise, large practitioner networks, and significant convening power, and APA Labs aims to use that to support thoughtful innovation.

What does APA Labs actually do?

First, they provide a service called CoLabs. These allow mental health organisations, from early-stage startups up to large, established platforms, to engage APA Labs for support. These engagements are typically focused on increasing provider buy-in (especially for new technologies), providing guidance on evidence generation to convince stakeholders, or helping answer important product or ethical questions.  

On top of this, they launched a Digital Badge Program to help validate products and give organisations a way to communicate that their products align with evidence and ethical standards. Ten companies have now received digital badges, including Calm Health, Kai, PlaySpace and Cora.

Finally, they host the annual Inside the Lab event.

What happens at Inside the Lab?

The event is less a traditional conference and more a two-day working event. It brings founders, clinicians, researchers, investors, payers, health systems and regulators into the same room. The programming is designed around participation rather than listening. When I’m at a conference listening to a speaker, I’m sitting there wishing I could ask questions and actually join the conversation on the topic. ITL seems to be designed to satisfy that desire of mine…

The first day will focus on understanding the tensions holding back innovation. There will be four thirty-minute sessions exploring each of the following tensions;

• Access versus quality

• Evidence versus speed

• Scale versus personalisation

• Innovation versus trust

After this, there will be a series of working sessions where you will collaborate on a specific problem within a team. You’ll look at that problem through the eyes of multiple stakeholders, helping you to understand their incentives and constraints. The groups then come back together to compare where they agreed and disagreed. This is followed by a lightning round where speakers present their big ideas for the field. Of course, there’s facilitated networking throughout the day too.

On day two, you’ll move into solutions mode. In groups, you’ll work to decide how to navigate these tensions and move forward in a meaningful way. There will also be a discussion on the priorities for the field over the next five years. Given the need for a new narrative of progress in mental health, I’m intrigued to see what comes out of this.

The people I spoke to who went last year said it was a really great event. It was hands-on, collaborative, and one investor told me he signed a cheque to a company he met during the event — so real deals and partnerships come out of it.

While we need third parties like APA Labs to help tackle the tensions in our ecosystem, we all still hold personal responsibility for contributing to the solutions. To listen, to understand, to empathise and to find common ground.

If this is something you want to be involved in, you can attend Inside the Lab with a 20% discount as a Hemingway Reader. Just use the code ITL2026WFOOY when signing up.

That’s all for this edition of The Hemingway Report.

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

Founder of Hemingway