Devyn Lowry’s Mission Building Ocean Labs: A New Approach to Mental Health

The US is facing a mental health crisis. One in four people struggle with a mental health condition that should be treated with therapy, but less than half of those people can access the care they need. 

Online therapy platforms have opened the door to remote care, but the way in which these companies employ therapists is beginning to impact clinical autonomy and quality of care. 

Having been in therapy throughout most of his life and assisted numerous friends and family members in navigating the search for a therapist, Devyn Lowry experienced the complexities of the mental health landscape first-hand. After years of ideating a better approach, he set out to build Ocean Labs, a new way to connect patients with the right therapists.

Introducing Ocean Labs: Infrastructure for Mental Health Care

Ocean Labs is building a marketplace and infrastructure platform for mental health. The platform includes infrastructure tools that enable therapists to run an independent practice, as well as a client-facing experience that makes it easier for individuals to find the right therapist for their needs.

Most mental health professionals undergo years of rigorous training with a dream of helping patients—not of operating a business. But in reality, many therapists are spending countless hours and dollars juggling fragmented tools and processes to manage their business, leaving less time and headspace for patient care. 

Online counseling platforms relieve this burden by employing therapists as contractors, but the nature of this arrangement results in companies imposing business KPIs on the therapists they employ, compromising care and clinical autonomy. 

Ocean Labs is providing clinicians with the infrastructure they need to run an independent practice on their own terms, and connects clinicians directly with clients without needing to market or build websites themselves. 

On the client’s side, Ocean Labs makes it easier for people to find the right therapists for their needs. Finding a therapist today can feel like throwing darts with a blindfold on—there’s little guidance, confusing clinical jargon, and endless directories to scroll through. Most “personalized” intakes are really just symptom checklists and fail to account for the full context of clients’ stories. 

Ocean is taking a different approach. Clients describe their situation in their own words, and Ocean Labs' matching engine analyzes 50+ factors, such as clinical alignment, therapist style, and the substance of the client's story, to surface a handful of high-confidence matches. Unlike directories that create an extensive list of therapists to sift through, or insurance networks that route based on availability, Ocean provides a manageable list of options chosen based on deep therapeutic fit. 

“We’re aiming to make it easier for people to find a therapist and address the problems clinicians face in running their practice,” Devyn explains. “We hope this will encourage more people to complete grad school and open up their own private practices, and ultimately help fix the shortage of clinicians in the country.”

Devyn’s journey to Ocean Labs

Devyn's gateway into technology and entrepreneurship was product design. He began building apps in his sophomore year of high school, and later attended University of Connecticut to study web design, building technical infrastructure for the school’s IT department alongside classes. 

As Devyn’s career began, first at media organizations and later multiple SaaS companies, he kept encountering friends and family struggling to find a therapist for their needs. He’d been in therapy since the age of four, and had become a go-to resource for peers trying to navigate the mental health landscape. 

The penny dropped when Devyn spoke to his aunt, who was struggling to find a therapist for Devyn’s cousin as well as herself. "What really sucked was listening to my family's struggles. I would be sitting with my aunt at her kitchen table until one or two in the morning talking with her about the problems she was experiencing trying to find a therapist for my cousin and herself. It was distressing, and those conversations really spurred me to create something that would make it easier to find a therapist"

In early 2024, after finishing a product for a startup, Devyn returned to University of Connecticut to get a second bachelor's degree in Psychological Sciences. "I wanted to make sure that I was doing justice to the mental health care field. It's very complicated, so I wanted to have as much baseline knowledge as possible before tackling this project.” Devyn completed the entire degree in a single year, and despite being accepted to Columbia University's master's program for Clinical Psychology, decided to begin building Ocean Labs. 

Having spent the last ten months building the platform’s public demo and proof of concept, Devyn is now in talks with VCs for Ocean Labs’s first raise.

Devyn’s Advice for Fellow Founders

Devyn has worked tirelessly since getting his second bachelor’s degree and building the foundations of Ocean Labs. He admits that even though he’s building a company aimed at supporting mental health, he feels constantly reminded of the “hustle culture” within the founder community. 

But he urges founders, and himself, to push back on that mindset. “There’s a lot of talk in startup life that if you’re not going to work all hours of the night, you’re going to be a failure. And I think that’s really unhealthy. You have to take time for yourself. It can be lonely, so make sure you're taking the time to properly disconnect. This is a marathon, not a sprint.” 

If you’re interested in learning more about Devyn’s founder journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit www.tryocean.io/ 

If you’re a clinician or someone seeking mental health care, Devyn would love to speak to you. “Involving people’s stories from the ground level is the biggest win for this kind of a product. I want to make sure that they’re ingrained into the DNA of Ocean Labs.” If you’re interested in chatting, you can reach Devyn directly at hello@tryocean.io.