- Company — Pear Therapeutics
- Sector — Digital therapeutics / healthcare
- Founded / Died — 2013 / Chapter 11 7 April 2023; assets auctioned May 2023
- Lifespan — ~10 years
- Capital raised — ~$400M gross via a December 2021 SPAC merger at a $1.6B enterprise value, plus earlier venture rounds
- Peak scale — Three FDA-authorised prescription digital therapeutics (reSET, reSET-O, Somryst); ~45,000 prescriptions filled in 2022; 2022 revenue ~$12.7M against losses many times that.
- What it built — The first FDA-cleared prescription software treatments — for substance use disorder and insomnia — prescribed by clinicians like drugs.
- Stated cause of death — The company said it could not secure financing and that payers would not reimburse its products at scale.
- Evidenced cause — Stated and evidenced causes agree; the case is in the category because the regulator's approval was the trap, not the obstacle. Pear did everything right by the FDA and discovered that FDA clearance does not create a reimbursement code. Without a CPT code and payer coverage, a prescription product has no buyer.
- Warning signs visible earlier — 2022 revenue of ~$12.7M against a $1.6B valuation. Reimbursement was an unsolved problem at the time of the SPAC, disclosed in the filings.
- Money outcome — Assets sold for a total of ~$6M across four buyers against ~$400M raised. Public SPAC shareholders lost effectively everything. Patients mid-treatment lost access.
- Post-mortem quality — Moderate; executives spoke at industry events and a Stanford case study exists. No founder document.
- Transferable lesson — Regulatory approval and commercial viability are separate gates with separate owners. In healthcare, the question "who writes the cheque, under what code" must be answered before the clinical trial, not after.
- Sources — STAT News on the auction · Fierce Biotech · Stanford GSB case
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