Beta Boom Backs NOCTEM Health to Make Gold-Standard Insomnia Care Available to Every Patient, Everywhere

One in three adults suffers from chronic insomnia. There are fewer than 500 specialists worldwide trained to treat it properly. For decades, that gap has been filled by sleeping pills, self-help apps, and referrals to a waitlist — not because better care doesn't exist, but because the healthcare system has never had the tools to deliver it at scale. NOCTEM Health was built to change that.

We're thrilled to announce that Beta Boom led NOCTEM Health's seed round. NOCTEM Health is a Pittsburgh-based clinical decision support platform that enables any healthcare provider — not just sleep specialists — to deliver Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTI), the evidence-based, first-line treatment that has long been out of reach for the vast majority of patients.

The Opportunity

Insomnia isn't a niche problem. Roughly 50% of primary care patients present with it. So do 72% of chronic pain patients, 72% of mental health patients, and 39–58% of patients with sleep apnea. It touches every medical specialty, worsens nearly every comorbid condition, and costs the healthcare system billions each year in added complexity and poor outcomes. Yet the gold-standard treatment, CBTI, has been locked behind a wall of scarcity. Training a provider to deliver it properly takes years; doing it in a way that actually fits a busy clinical workflow has been nearly impossible. Tech-only solutions, apps, and digital therapeutics have tried to fill the gap, but without a clinician in the loop, patient engagement collapses and outcomes tank too. The insomnia treatment market is large and growing rapidly, and it has remained dramatically underserved precisely because no one had solved the workflow problem. That is until NOCTEM Health built its platform.

The Company

NOCTEM's platform, called COAST, is a clinical decision support system that digitizes and automates the complex workflows of CBTI, reducing provider time to under 10 minutes per patient per week. Proprietary algorithms guide treatment decisions in real time, personalizing care without requiring the provider to be a sleep expert. Importantly, COAST is built around a "clinician-in-the-loop" model — it amplifies the provider rather than replacing them, which is what drives the patient engagement and retention that tech-only solutions have consistently failed to achieve.

The clinical results are striking: 82% of patients complete the full program, 70% respond to treatment within five weeks, and 52% achieve full remission from insomnia. These outcomes were validated in a non-inferiority randomized clinical trial published in SLEEP. The economic case for clinics is equally compelling: treating 500 patients per year through COAST generates roughly $230,000 in new reimbursable revenue, delivering over a 200% ROI for clinics. NOCTEM currently serves multiple small clinics and large hospitals and networks including Stanford Health Care, Intermountain Health, and Penn State Health. Noctem has helped to treat over 1,400 patients.

The Founders

Anne Germain, Ph.D., NOCTEM's founder and CEO, is one of the world's most highly regarded behavioral sleep medicine specialists. She spent 25 years as a tenured professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, running a well-funded clinical research program and training hundreds of providers in CBTI delivery. Most people in her position would have stayed. Anne walked away from it because she saw a problem that academia couldn't solve alone and believed she was the person to help bring CBTI to the masses.

What makes Anne exceptional isn't just her credentials. It's the depth of her market knowledge and the relentlessness with which she pursued it. She has tried every device, every app, and every digital solution in the insomnia space — not as a reviewer, but as a practitioner who needed to understand exactly where each one failed and why. She can tell you, in granular detail, what works, what doesn't, and what the gaps are that competitors have consistently missed. That level of hands-on, obsessive market understanding is rare in any founder. In a deeply technical clinical domain, it is almost unheard of. 

Anne then spent years refining COAST's user experience through real-world deployments with military healthcare settings and the VA, iterating under the demanding conditions of high-stakes, under-resourced clinical environments where anything that wasn't genuinely simple and practical simply wouldn't survive. Anne’s obsession with the detail of the clinical and patient experience led to a platform that fits how providers actually work, not how product managers imagine they do.

Anne also brings something that many first-time technical founders lack: proven experience leading large, complex organizations. Managing a major research program, training cohorts of clinicians, and navigating the institutional realities of academic medicine required the same skills that building and scaling a startup demands: recruiting, resource allocation, stakeholder management, and the ability to deliver under pressure. 

Why We Invested

We back founders who know their market better than anyone else and Anne Germain is one of the most prepared founders we've met. She didn't discover this problem from the outside; she lived it for two decades. She trained the specialists who couldn't scale. She used the apps that didn't work. She built the research that proved CBTI was the answer, and then she left a successful career to commercialize it because she was convinced no one else would get it right. That combination of clinical credibility, genuine obsession, and operational experience is exactly what this market requires and exactly what Beta Boom looks for.

We also believe the "clinician-in-the-loop" model is a genuine and durable innovation. The digital therapeutics space has spent years trying to remove the provider from the equation in order to scale. NOCTEM's insight is the opposite: the provider is the key to engagement, retention, and outcomes and the right technology doesn't replace them, it multiplies them. That reframe is both clinically sound and commercially smart, and we think it positions NOCTEM to build the category-defining platform in behavioral sleep medicine. 

Finally, NOCTEM came to us at a major inflection point having proven product-market fit with net revenue retention well above 100% and revenue accelerating quickly and on track to 3X year-over-year. The factors put together made us at Beta Boom thrilled to be partner with Anne and her team to continue to grow NOCTEM across the U.S. and internationally.

What's Next

With this seed round, NOCTEM will accelerate commercial growth with the goal of reaching $3M in ARR, expand the sales and account management team, and build out the enterprise-grade features, including EHR and billing integrations, that will unlock additional large health system contracts. The foundation is strong. Now it's time to scale!

If you're building in digital health, behavioral medicine, or clinical AI and think Beta Boom might be a fit, we'd love to hear from you — apply here.

Fellow investors interested in NOCTEM Health's financing or future rounds are welcome to reach out to Sergio or Kimmy Paluch at Beta Boom.

To connect directly with the NOCTEM team, reach out to Anne Germain, Ph.D. on LinkedIn or at anne@noctemhealth.com.

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