Investing in Frontera: A New Model for Autism

Many of us in healthcare know the following stats, but it never ceases to impress the gravity of the situation in autism care today. Today, one out of every 36 children in the U.S. is diagnosed with ASD, a rate that has quadrupled since 2000. Yet, the infrastructure to support these children and their families has not kept pace with the rate of diagnosis.

Families spend between $40,000 and $60,000 per year on treatments ranging from behavior technicians to speech, occupational, and sensory integration therapies. Even with state mandates requiring commercial health plans to cover autism care, a critical shortage of qualified technicians continues to leave families without access to the support they need. We now find ourselves in a situation where autism is among the leading cost drivers of state budgets and growing.

To no surprise, founders and investors alike have leaned in over the years to meet these national-scale challenges. Most of the activity has been in private equity-backed consolidation and platform builds, which have infused valuable professionalization of the fragmented industry but also drawn the ire of families and regulators alike, often deservedly so. On the venture side, outside of a few exceptions, I have found most founders to be deeply committed to the mission at hand. They are building valuable tools and innovative business models that we’re rooting for.

Personally, having been exposed to autism companies for nearly a decade, one nagging thought pattern kept emerging. We, as founders, investors, and patient advocacy groups, may have built our entire autism care system on a fundamentally weak foundation. If we reimburse for what we manage, and if we can only manage that which we can measure, the foundation from which so much is built upon is measurement. And in a condition so complex and dynamic that it has the concept of ‘spectrum’ literally its name, we are fundamentally crude and imprecise.

It is with this foundational paradigm in mind that we met Amol Deshpande, founder of Frontera, to embark on a journey to transform the way autism and neurodevelopmental care is measured, accessed, and delivered.

A Founder with a Personal Mission and Deeply Informed Opinion

While we were impressed by Amol’s background as a partner at Kleiner Perkins and founder/CEO of Farmers Business Network (FBN), which he grew to hundreds of millions in revenue, we were particularly provoked by Amol’s sophisticated understanding of the autism landscape. It was evident that beyond Amol’s deeply personal experience as a parent to a child diagnosed with autism, he was intimately aware of the challenges, nuances, and opportunities in the market. Since his son’s diagnosis, Amol founded a fund dedicated to neurodiversity and has made more than 30 investments, many of which provided direct experience and exposure to this complex market.

Combining this domain perspective with Amol’s track record of execution and reimagining of industries, from investing in Beyond Meats to pioneering in AgTech with FBN, was very compelling. He’s put together a stellar team with both domain and functional expertise across clinical, research, AI, and product roles — and is constantly on the search for more top-tier talent.

Redefining Autism Care with Frontera

Central to our thesis is the role of technology in unlocking a set of capabilities never before possible. Frontera’s technology spans both clinical and administrative use cases. At its foundation, Frontera leverages its latest generation multimodal (e.g. video, audio) AI to analyze therapeutic sessions at an unprecedented fidelity, tracking clinically valuable interactions and behaviors while generating comprehensive and unbiased assessments. Until now, these complex behaviors, such as eye contact, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, were largely collected on clinician recall. Now, thanks to Frontera, they are quantified and categorized at incredibly accurate levels.

These models, trained and adapted by experienced clinicians, essentially enable Frontera to fully capture rich, real-time, objective behavior data that is otherwise lost. In turn, Frontera leverages this data to more precisely characterize a child’s unique needs (e.g., identify which child may benefit from earlier speech therapy) and empower clinicians to make more tailored, data-driven decisions. We believe the better we are able to measure and phenotype autism, the better we can manage this complex condition, and perhaps even propose new models of delivery and reimbursement of care and quality. These capabilities will be packaged in a Digital Phenotyping solution that we are beginning to roll out in a limited release.

Finally, aside from the core data phenotyping model, Frontera is naturally well-positioned to build a suite of tools to ease the administrative and documentation burden that often leads to the bandwidth and access issues that plague the field.

Starting Where it’s Needed Most

True to Amol’s mission and mindset, Frontera is not stuck in a technology ivory tower. Frontera is operating a clinic in rural New Mexico where access is a particularly acute problem. Our ability to learn from a tough real-world clinical environment is, in a way, a crucible for our technology. We are also opening our first Innovation Center, an ABA clinic with both diagnostic and therapeutic services, leveraging the latest Frontera technologies for our clinicians and their families. Seeing the early success and reactions to our tools in the hands of real-world clinicians has made the wait well worth it — and we are just getting started.

In a Frontera-powered future, we believe that clinicians will have a system of AI-driven tools to make better, more informed decisions, and more patients will receive care — more seamlessly and at a higher personalized quality than ever before.

That’s why we’re excited to co-lead Frontera’s $32 million financing alongside Lux Capital as we work to transform autism care and give families and clinicians the support they’ve been waiting for.

If anything said above got you energized, don’t be a stranger and shoot the Frontera team a note. We’re always looking for high-integrity, talented, and motivated folks to join the journey.