Outro, a New York-based neuroscience platform focused on helping patients discontinue psychiatric medications, said last week that it raised $7 million in pre-seed and seed funding.
The company said its model combines visits with clinicians trained in safe deprescribing, personalized tapering plans, and access to compounded medication doses. Investors in the round included Listen Ventures, Cake Ventures, Jason Calicanis's LAUNCH, Actions Capital, Hannah Grey Ventures, SemperVirens, Brock Recovery Group and Pave Health Ventures.
The financing points to a narrower but increasingly investable healthcare thesis: not every medication problem is about improving initiation or adherence. Outro is betting that stopping treatment safely can become its own care infrastructure category, beginning with antidepressants, where the company argues support is widely needed but hard to find.
The Care Model
CEO Brandon Goode said, “Roughly 1 in 6 Americans take antidepressants. There are tens of millions of people on these drugs, yet no science-based way to get off safely.” Outro's current focus is on psychiatric medications, with antidepressants as the starting point.
The company's approach is based on hyperbolic tapering, a method developed in part by co-founder Dr. Mark Horowitz. Rather than reducing a drug by equal increments, hyperbolic tapering gradually reduces the dose by smaller and smaller amounts as the dose gets lower. Horowitz said deprescribing guidance has existed in countries like the U.K. for years, but tapering support in the U.S. remains difficult to access.
Outro also cited research from Horowitz showing that four in five long-term antidepressant users were unable to stop their medications because of withdrawal symptoms. That statistic helps explain the business case: if withdrawal is common and standard care pathways are limited, a service layer built around tapering support may be able to create demand without needing to invent a new drug or device.
Where The Money Goes Next
Goode said the new capital will be used to expand Outro's network of deprescribing-trained clinicians and to build AI clinical decision support for deprescribing. In this case, the AI element is positioned as support for clinical decisions rather than a replacement for clinicians, which fits a category where dose changes and withdrawal management can be highly individualized.
The company also plans to move beyond antidepressants. Goode identified benzodiazepines, gabapentinoids and GLP-1s as other drug classes that may require safe off-ramps.
That expansion plan broadens the addressable market, but it also changes the challenge. Antidepressant tapering gives Outro a focused entry point with a named method and a co-founder closely associated with the underlying research. Extending the model across multiple drug classes will test whether deprescribing can scale as a repeatable care platform rather than remain a condition-specific service.
