Damayanti Dipayana launched Manatee in 2019 to make pediatric mental healthcare better through technology and a family approach.
Manatee is a virtual mental health clinic. Its platform builds a personalized care plan for families, including self-guided courses, goals and a care team of licensed therapists, parent coaches and peers.
Manatee has won the Prime Health Challenge, The Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Digital Health Lab and the HLTH startup pitch competition and is a Techstars portfolio company. Since its launch, Manatee has raised money from institutional investors like GreyMatter, Graph Ventures, Grand Ventures, Hopelab and Springtime and from corporate VCs like Bluecross Blueshield and American Family.
“Studies show that virtual therapy is as effective as in-person therapy, and going virtual has many other benefits!” the company said. “We’re able to hire the best therapists, regardless of location, so you have access to high-quality care from the comfort of your home. With this model, we can help more people in need be more easily accessible to the care that they deserve.”
Prior to Manatee, Dipayana founded Be Frank, an award-winning video production company that discusses tough and socially relevant topics — from sexual assault to systemic racism — and created content for large brands like Google and Planned Parenthood and has been covered in the HuffPost, Daily Mail, Upworthy and more.
Prior to Be Frank, DiPayana joined Qubit, a software-as-a-service company built for e-commerce personalization that four ex-Google employees founded, as their first non-technical hire. She was tasked with running operations and building customer success and professional services. She scaled the company through a successful Series C ($76 million) led by Goldman Sachs and Sapphire Ventures, Accel Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Balderton Capital.
During her tenure, she built a global, high-performing services team of 100 people that was 50% female and 50% ethnically diverse. She attained revenue targets (102% renewal rate) through the delivery of large enterprise contracts (up to $4 million) across 75 U.S. enterprise customers, including the Estee Lauder Group, Emirates, Staples, Lenovo, the NET-A-PORTER GROUP and others.
Earlier in her career, Dipayana ran marketing at Validsoft, a fintech company that secures transactions through voice biometrics and multifactor authentication, and account management at Grapple Mobile, a London startup developing mobile and tablet app software and application programming interfaces.
Dipayana was born in the Netherlands and earned her bachelor’s degree in international business and global banking from European Business School London, part of Regent’s University London.
“Quitting my job and moving to the middle of the U.S. when I was pregnant with kid No. 2” was the biggest risk of Dipayana’s career, she said. “I took it because it was the only decision that felt true to myself AND because I have a super supportive partner — the right partners enable us to take risks and feel like the sky is the limit.”
