WeUsThem, the Halifax ad agency, has spun off its software business unit into a new startup, HealthEMe, which is raising a roughly $1 million seed round.

HealthEMe’s first product is imTEEN, which was originally released by WeUsThem and allows youth to track and manage their mental health by self-monitoring for signs of common mental illnesses.

CEO Ashwin Kutty said the spinoff was aimed partly at simplifying a capital raise, now slated to be finished the end of this quarter, by more clearly delineating the startup business from the service company.

“In the past year, WeUsThem has been the one pushing this IP out there because we used it as our incubation hub,” said Kutty, who co-founded both businesses with former Dalhousie University management professor Faten Alshazly. “We had to spin it off because we needed a dedicated team to support it. It’s a product offering, not a service offering like WeUsThem is.

“And of course, when we go for investments, and we go for clients, and what have you, they like not having the confusion of ‘Who is HealthEMe and what is WeUsThem?’”

WeUsThem also offers consulting services to governments focused on information technology, governance practices and change management.

Kutty said that work drew his and Alshazly’s attention to a structural problem facing healthcare globally: another worker shortage. The medical labour force worldwide, including for mental healthcare, is failing to keep pace with population growth, with the World Health Organization projecting a shortfall of 10 million workers by 2030.

“The demand for mental health service has gone up, whereas supply has remained constant,” said Kutty. “So we’ve come up with things like tele-psychiatry and we’ve come up with things like virtual supports, but nothing to actually deal with the bottleneck of the fact that we still don’t have the supply to meet demand.

“We are at a place where we need to find a solution that actually meets the unmet need (for services).”

And so he and Alshazly created imTEEN to help youths take a more proactive approach to managing their own mental health. Much of how the platform works is based on the research of Dr. Stan Kutcher, a professor emeritis of psychiatry at Dalhousie. The app also prompts users to contact emergency services if they show signs of suicidal ideation, for example.

HealthEMe uses a business-to-business revenue model, selling subscriptions to organizations like government agencies and universities. Kutty said insurance companies have also shown significant interest — part of a broader trend towards digital healthcare in the insurance industry that last year saw Toronto health insurance giant Green Shield buy Halifax’s Tranquility Online.

Kutty and Alshazly also plan to roll out similar platforms for monitoring physical health issues and with different target demographics. Kutty said the $1 million seed round will give them about 12 to 18 months of runway.

“We’re looking for partners that can not just bring the financial resources, but also are strategically located,” said Kutty. “If you have investment partners from the U.S. and South Korea, those are great opportunities for reaching to those markets.”

HealthEMe so-far has four employees and is looking to hire at least another three, possibly more, with those roles going to developers and business development specialists. Right now, Kutty and Alshazly do most of their own business development work, and Kutty said he hopes to free up some of their time for other uses.

In 2020, Kutty and Alshazly won the Nova Scotia Health Authority's Health Challenge pitch competition, which bagged them $100,000 and a commercialization deal with the province, which is now underway.

They are also working with Halifax-based Indigenous non-profit Ulnooweg to make imTEEN available to First Nations people. And they have strong leads with two potential buyers in Ontario and a major American university.