Up to 90 percent of drugs fail after passing animal studies.

Frontier Bio provides a better way with high-fidelity human tissue models. These models help researchers test therapies accurately while reducing reliance on animal testing.

This approach has driven $5.5M in cumulative sales since 2018. Now, they are advancing a bioresorbable vascular graft for the clinic.

By mastering blood vessel engineering, they are laying the foundation for transplantable human organs.

You can see real-time updates on their Wefunder page below.

There’s a massive blind spot in how we support kids’ mental health.

On one end, you have apps - meditation, journaling, breathing exercises. They’re cheap, scalable… but not personal and lack deep engagement.

On the other end, you have therapy - effective, but expensive, hard to access, and often overkill for most kids.

So what happens to the millions of kids in the middle?

That’s the wedge Tapouts is going after.

The company is building a live, group-based mental health coaching platform for kids, designed to sit directly between wellness apps and clinical therapy.

And unlike most “mental health startups,” this one is already showing traction from both an engagement and revenue standpoint. Let’s dig in.

Tapouts is not therapy.

It’s structured social-emotional learning (SEL) delivered through small, live group sessions - what they call “pods.”

The key insight here is simple:

Instead of passive consumption, Tapouts is building active, social, habit-forming experiences.

From the graphic, revenue growth is strong (although that last red bar has 9 months in between itself and the last readout, vs 6 months for all other bars, meaning it had more time for growth)

Still the company is on track for $7M in ARR, with some impressive stats surrounding it:

Tapouts is seeing traction despite mental health being a notoriously hard category to scale. Most products fail because kids don’t stick with it or parents don’t see results.

Tapouts is solving this through engagement:

Despite Tapouts’ strong growth, there’s so many levers this company can pull to accelerate its trajectory…

Tapouts recently inked its first large enterprise deal with ServiceNow - a company with ~29,000 employees - to offer Tapouts as part of employee’s benefits package.

HR-driven distribution at scale is a completely different growth engine.

Instead of acquiring one family at a time, Tapouts can plug into large organizations and instantly access thousands of households.

If this channel works, it could meaningfully compress CAC while accelerating growth.

Schools are obviously the best distribution partner in this ecosystem.

If adopted at the district or school level, this becomes less of a consumer product and more like infrastructure - super sticky.

I could see many schools perceiving Tapouts doing the work that their teachers should be doing, and therefore aren’t receptive to the program.

On the other hand, schools would find value in a partner that improves their children’s mental health & classroom behavior so that they can focus solely on educating.

Today, Tapouts is fully virtual. Adding Brick & Mortar could strengthen the brand, and an eye-catching storefront could reduce the need to spend heavily on advertising to acquire new customers.

Right now, the average child stays on the platform for ~5 months.

That’s solid, but also a clear opportunity. With an expanded curriculum, Tapouts can serve kids across more age ranges and introduce more topic-specific programs (confidence, anxiety, social skills, etc.).

If they extend retention from 5 months to, say, 9–12 months, LTV could double without an increase to user acquisition. This is a HUGE lever to pull in revenue & profitability.

This one surprised me because on the surface the idea seems like a Covid-era remote-learning idea that would wither & die once normal life returned. And yet, the opposite has happened; since 2023 growth has been on a ferocious pace upward.

I’m a proud Kumon graduate and they’re a good example of how big this can get. Kumon did $113M in revenue within North America last year. Globally, the figure was $600M+.

Given the whitespace and growth levers that Tapouts has, I’d say they’re capable of reaching these figures. My main concern with Tapouts centers around their customer acquisition costs.

At present, the company is growing through member referrals (great!) and performance marketing. Currently, it costs ~$180 in ads for them to acquire a free trial. Customers than provide on average $810 in LTV.

Let’s say 10% of parents have been desperately looking for something like Tapouts and are ripe to convert once they see an ad. There is a risk that after this cohort converts into customers, the next 10% of parents are interested, but not as passionate.

Converting this cohort may require more ads, and CAC creeps up to $250. Then the next cohort is even more challenging - CAC becomes $400. And ultimately the business model falls apart because the customer acquisition costs leaves the business with no cash.

All hypothetical of course, and every consumer-facing company deals with this issue. I believe Tapouts has a lot more room to run before this happens, and it can always offset this with Brand Marketing, LTV gains, B2B/School partnerships, and Brick & Mortar presence.

Tapouts is raising at a $50M valuation, which is around a 6-7x revenue multiple - super reasonable considering their growth rate. They are also raising an institutional round, so they should theoretically be well-capitalized for their next chapter of growth.

I like this opportunity and would absolutely consider investing in them. If you’d like to check them out for yourself, see the link below!

Overall CROWDSCALE Score:
8.2 / 10

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