By Rod Price, Founder and CEO, Ithos Wellness
Somewhere in the middle of writing a grant application, updating our pitch deck for a veteran-focused investment firm, and preparing materials for early funder conversations, I stopped and looked at what was in front of me. Pages of carefully chosen words. Hundreds of character-limited answers. Data I had gathered, refined, and re-examined until I could recite it in my sleep.
I’ve spent months in the fundraising process thinking of it as a means to an end. A necessary step. Something to get through so I could get back to building. But sitting there, looking at everything laid out, I realized the process had been doing something I had not asked it to do. It had been pulling me back, over and over again, to the original vision. Not what North is today. What North is going to be.
Every question on every form was the same question wearing different clothes: Why does this matter? Who does it serve? What happens if it actually works?
Answering those questions, repeatedly, with precision, kept returning me to the same place. The one that started all of this.
The Problem That Started Everything
I am a Marine Corps veteran and a former first responder. I have stood in emergency rooms and watched what cumulative trauma does to people who spend their lives in service. I have seen colleagues reach out for help and disengage before they ever found it, not because they lacked the will, but because the system failed them at the entry point.
The numbers are stark. In 2023, 6,398 veterans died by suicide. SAMHSA estimates that 30% of first responders develop PTSD or depression. There are 15.8 million veterans in the United States alone. And yet finding timely, compatible, trauma-informed care is still too hard. The system is fragmented. Wait times stretch weeks to months. Provider fit is often poor. Too many people give up before they ever connect with meaningful support.
Research published in Psychological Trauma documents that veterans disengage from outpatient mental health treatment at nearly twice the rate of the general population, 42% versus 19.7%, with provider mismatch as a leading cause. The problem is not just need. It is access. And access is not just about availability. It is about compatibility, trust, and whether the system meets people where they actually are.
The problem is two-sided. Veterans and first responders cannot find compatible care. And the trauma-informed providers who want to serve these populations cannot find them efficiently either. No scalable infrastructure exists to solve both sides at once.
That is what North is built to do.
What North Is Built to Be
North is a behavioral health navigation platform for veterans, first responders, and healthcare professionals. It operates as a two-sided marketplace, connecting high-need users with compatible, trauma-informed providers through AI-driven matching. It is not a crisis line, not a generic wellness app, and not a therapist directory. It is the infrastructure that has never existed between distress and care.
At the core of North are Tactical Knowledge Frameworks, the brain of the platform. TKFs are not just content. They are the structured intelligence layer that makes North tactical rather than generic, giving the AI a mission-specific knowledge base to draw from instead of producing surface-level responses. Built around real issues users face, including grief, trauma, anger, sleep disruption, VA benefits navigation, and family strain, each TKF combines plain-language education, guided reflection, and practical next steps in the kind of direct, mission-aligned language that veterans and first responders actually respond to. TKFs are what turn North from a conversation engine into a genuine navigation system.
On the provider side, trauma-informed therapists pay a flat monthly subscription for exclusive access to a referred, pre-qualified patient population they cannot reach efficiently anywhere else. North never takes a cut of clinical revenue. The model is designed to compound: more providers improve match quality, better matches drive user retention, and retained users attract institutional partners like employers, EAPs, and veteran organizations.
What the Fundraising Process Clarified
Every grant question, every pitch deck slide, every investor conversation is forcing me to defend assumptions, justify numbers, and articulate beliefs out loud to people who would, and should, push back. That pressure has not weakened the vision. It has made it more precise.
North is currently in active development, with a functioning platform, onboarded clinical advisors, and a committed pilot partnership with a large regional nonprofit whose CEO has committed to providing access to hundreds of veterans annually for our structured pilot. We are pursuing early stage funding and cultivating intentional partnerships with investors who are veterans themselves and who connect with this mission at an identity level, not just a financial one. We are building toward a validated, evidence-generating proof of concept in Spokane County that scales nationally.
The addressable market is enormous. The problem is documented. The infrastructure to solve it does not exist yet. And the team building it has lived it firsthand.
Fundraising did not distract me from the mission. It kept returning me to it, sharper each time, more certain of what North needs to become and why the timing is right.
If you believe that veterans and first responders deserve better than a fragmented system and a weeks-long wait, and especially if you have worn a uniform and understand firsthand what that means, we want you in this with us. Follow our journey at mynorthapp.com, Wefunder and ithoswellness.com
Rod Price Founder and CEO, Ithos Wellness Marine Corps Veteran | Former First Responder mynorthapp.com | ithoswellness.com