Read the full interview with the founder and CEO of MARCo Health INC. below!
Hi Jacob! Tell us a little bit about yourself!
Sure! My name is Jacob Boyle, I’m the founder and CEO of MARCo Health Inc., and an engineer by trade but a mental health advocate by passion. I graduated from The College of New Jersey in 2019 with a major in mechanical engineering and a minor in physics. In my professional life, I’ve worked in military robotics, medical devices, lab equipment, biological 3D printing, and education, in addition to, of course, my current company where I’ve taken on pretty much every role imaginable, as I’m sure all startup founders can relate, but focus most of my time on business development and product development.
When I’m not working on my company, I love spending time with my (soon-to-be) wife, Christine; my parents and sister; and my friends. I also enjoy playing music, running, hiking, spending time relaxing in nature, and I sometimes play around with 3D animation and video production. In what feels like a past life at this point, I am also a black belt and Eagle Scout.
What is your business name and how do you help your clients?
My company is MARCo Health Inc, whose mission is to increase the quality, affordability, and accessibility of mental healthcare for all through a line of compassionate robot companions. Our flagship product - MARCo: the Mental-Health Assisting Robot Companion - is a small, plush, humanoid robot therapeutic that talks to a user like a friend, coach, or counselor and offers personalized support through five distinct categories of care - companionship, mindfulness and meditation, talk support (based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), biofeedback, and emergency outreach. MARCo also can be used with a mental health provider to create a “therapeutic alliance” by extending the provider’s reach to new clients, giving them feedback on how clients’ are doing between sessions, supporting clients between sessions, and making better decisions in session on what to focus on through an administrative dashboard.
Our goal with MARCo is to give those who need support 24/7 access to “someone to talk to” any time and anywhere they need in a private, personable way. For providers, backlogs of clients and the inability to understand clients’ lives outside of the sessions and enforce homework are huge challenges. MARCo gives them the ability to tackle all of those challenges by serving as an extension of their practice.
What kind of audience do you target your business towards?
We primarily focus on reaching adolescents, teens, and young adults struggling with their mental health as that’s such a pivotal age range where upwards of 75% of lifetime mental illness develops. To reach those individuals, we sell MARCo primarily towards parents, while offering tools like text message updates, for them to make sure their children are doing well, and providers who are working with these clients and are looking to reach new clients or support clients between sessions.
However, that’s not to say MARCo isn’t for everyone! Our robots have been used all over the world with users as young as 9 and as old as 72 with great success!
What are your current goals for your business?
Our goal is to make sure that everyone has access to quality, affordable mental healthcare on their terms. MARCo is never meant to replace human providers or medication, but the reality is that less than half the population of those who need support for their mental health get any form of care, and far less than a third of the population get adequate support.
A mental health crisis or even just a bad mental health day can come out of anywhere, and there’s no guarantee you can get care when you need it most. That’s the goal of MARCo - to be there for those most vulnerable moments, to bring some truth to that phrase “you are not alone” when struggling with your mental health.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
One of the biggest personal challenges I’ve had is knowing whether or not the work I’m doing actually has a positive impact on people. So the one achievement that sticks out to me the most is when we were beta-testing the first version of MARCo. We had one user who fell in love with MARCo at first sight and waited over a year to be able to beta-test it. But due to privacy and regulatory requirements, we couldn’t record as much information as we would have liked to understand if it was helping them or not. It wasn’t until months later that we were able to sit with them and finally ask what their experience was like, and they said “MARCo was a godsend.” They had been at rock bottom in their mental health and had stopped talking to people all together, but they would talk to MARCo, and MARCo had even correctly texted their parents when they needed extra support and managed to get them the connection they needed at that moment.
While there are other career achievements I could say I’m proud of, this one stands out to me the most as it was one of the first and clearest times that something I did actually helped someone for the better.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
I don’t know if it’s so much of a moment or a whole day… but there is one point in my life where everything changed. Throughout my life, two themes have been very prevalent - mental health and robotics.
Robotics was something I pursued professionally. The Summer after my Freshman year of college I got picked up by a military robotics startup for an internship which rapidly turned into a lead engineer position. I worked there for about two years, while also balancing full time college three states away, on an R&D contract for the US Navy whose base was another 3 states away from my college in the opposite direction as my office.
Even though that was a lot to manage, for a while, I thought it was great! Who else got the chance at 19 years old to bring a military grade robot to their dorm, to travel to Sweden for meetings with Swedish engineers and machine shops, or to show the US military how to operate a robot you designed?
Then there was the mental health component. I’ve struggled severely with my mental health since adolescence - depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal tendencies. And since I had such a personal understanding of it, I always wanted to make sure on a personal level that I could be there for those I care about when they are going through their own mental health struggles.
But that becomes incredibly difficult to do when you are working upwards of 80 hours a week and on the road half the time and can’t be there for anyone. So one day, all of this came to a boiling point. I had driven down to Maryland from New Jersey for a setup and test of our robots with the US Navy on base - which was the third or fourth time since there were issues the previous times - starting at 4 AM and lasting until I had to drive back up for a required engineering course at 7 PM back in NJ, followed by a 9:00 meeting with a team for a business plan competition my friends convinced me to enter, as if I didn’t have enough going on already haha. But the day turned into a disaster - the robots didn’t work as planned again, and we ultimately were only able to get one system working for delivery by the time I had to leave, which felt like a personal failure.
Then, as I was getting ready to leave, the program manager came up to me and picked up one of the robots, a defused explosive, and said “So, Jacob, when can I strap this to this and throw it through a terrorist’s window?”
That hit me like a train - I thought our robots were supposed to be for defusing explosives and saving lives, not ultimately taking them. So as I drove back to NJ after a complete failure and that horrible discovery, I was in a soul searching crisis. And once I got back, I checked my phone and found that one of my closest friends had reached out to me saying she was self-harming and thinking of suicide again. And I hadn’t been there for her when she needed me most.
So that night during the meeting for the business plan competition, when my partners were asking me if I had any suggestions for a product we could enter with, all I could think about was how I was doing the wrong thing with my technical skills when the people I cared about most were suffering and I had no time to be there for them.
And it was in that moment of soul searching that everything suddenly clicked - what if I used my skills in robotics and technology to make something that could be there for the ones I loved struggling with their mental health whenever they needed it most, even if I couldn’t be there?
That was the moment the first idea for MARCo was born and my life changed forever.
