Background

Maya PBC — established in 2020 with $5.5MM in funding from a notable array of angels and venture capital firms — was designed in response to founder David Champion’s nonprofit psilocybin research, in collaboration with eminent scientists at Johns Hopkins University and with a diverse team of engineers, designers, psychedelic providers, and strategic partners.

The Maya team developed a beta platform intentionally to serve the many facilitators, therapists, clinicians, scientists, and retreat leaders in the nascent legal marketplace; following a revival in research and media surrounding the potential for psychedelic compounds (entheogens) to benefit mental health and wellbeing across populations.

Maya soon unveiled the first technology platform intentionally designed to standardize measurement protocols across the legal psychedelics landscape, offering the only data model equipped to handle the multitude of variables and nuanced characteristics that are intrinsic to any personal psychological journey, encompassing what academia terms “mystical experiences.”

Mission

Maya’s mission is to chart safe and effective psychedelic practices in a fully secure and trusted non-partisan environment so that everyone has the opportunity to access and benefit from high-quality, legal, psychedelic-assisted psychiatric healing and cognitive expansion.

Announcing the Maya+Nillion Partnership

“The union of Maya and Nillion could redefine how we think about personal health and lifestyle data, with the psychedelic services ecosystem as its incubator.
This partnership has been cultivated over two years of planning and collaboration, anchored by our teams’ shared desire to create systematic access to safe and compliant psychedelic services. With state-of-the-art quantum-proof security, we wish to provide the necessary structures for reporting to our government while reducing the fear of legal repercussions inherent to this topic.

“The Maya+Nillion architecture is designed to be a protective cocoon for providers and recipients of transformative medicines, no matter their circumstances. The potential for this model to revive trust and hope for humankind will, we hope, expand far beyond the niche psychedelics market, with the capacity to inform better models of care across medicine, academia, and life sciences.”

David Champion, CEO and Founder of Maya

State of the Industry

As legislation in Oregon, Colorado, and other states establish access to legal psychedelic services, the waitlist grows for individuals from all demographic groups to engage with Psilocybin, Ibogaine, and other natural entheogens for therapeutic healing and cognitive expansion.

However, this is a unique, non-clinical market, distinct from the medical Ketamine models that have grown popular in the last decade.

Psilocybin service centers function more like yoga studios, inviting clients to receive facilitated sessions in a physical space. Unlike yoga studios, however, they maintain responsibility for providing psychological care and safety support for individuals with wide-ranging mental health and socio-economic circumstances.

For this reason, service center operators have struggled to run day-to-day operations by piecing together off-the-shelf and disconnected software tools to manage their data records, sustain safety measures, and report to state compliance authorities, creating unnecessary friction for clients and a bottle-neck to the many thousands of inter-state applicants waiting to access these services.

Maya is Solving This Problem

Easy onboarding and hands-free operations

With user experience and human-centered design at the forefront, Maya artistically invites users through their journey with psychedelics, guiding them with the information to support each encounter, providing a welcoming and frictionless experience.

Standardization & Automation

A user’s experience can be calibrated to their individual needs and intentions while maintaining a uniform methodology for providers to implement high-quality services and safety measures as a standard.

Optimized & Quantifiable Health Outcomes

From this synchronization between business owners, their customers, and the authorities comes an opportunity to learn how psychedelic practices are performing based on objective (de-identified) data so that leaders in the space can collaboratively and iteratively improve the many nuances involved in delivering psychological care while helping newcomers to learn and adopt best practices quickly.

Peace of Mind with Legal and Compliance Reporting

The Maya team and its association partners have embraced the responsibility of maintaining an up-to-date index of state-mandated forms, legal documents, and other instruments, relieving service center operators of the many hours of administration otherwise required to maintain compliance with current laws.

Ultimate Privacy & Security

While efforts to modernize political thinking surrounding psychedelics have reached new strengths, the residual fear of persecution from the eyes of the law can inhibit individuals from engaging with this opportunity — a critical point of contention in the endeavor to create equal access opportunities for psychedelic services. Maya’s governing ethics and technology infrastructure are designed to release this dogma and to bring greater peace of mind to all stakeholders.

Origins of the Maya+Nillion Relationship

“As a long-time personal friend of Andrew Masanto’s, I was delighted to be introduced by our mutual investors Mark Zittman and Joe Roos in 2022 to explore what a technology partnership like this could offer to both companies. Since learning about the NMC Protocol and Nillion’s pioneering work on this technology, I’ve been tremendously excited to form a full integration that can serve the needs of a new era for psychedelic services across the globe. This announcement is one small step towards that future. The Maya team is proud to be moving in unison with Nillion and their network of like-minded innovators as we seek to deliver a more secure, sophisticated, and transparent framework for psychedelics to exist in society.”

- David Champion, CEO & Founder, Maya PBC

“I’ve known David (Founder of Maya) for many years, and I’ve seen him build and exit a successful business. I’m excited to work with him on this and see him change yet another industry for the better.”

- Andrew Masanto, CSO & Founder, Nillion

What This Means

The decision for Maya to begin migrating our backend architecture away from centralized data storage and compute engines, such as GCP and AWS, to the decentralized Nillion network is based on unanimous recognition that de-identified, aggregate, quantum-secure, real-world user data is a precious asset for the refinement of mental healthcare models.

The self-sovereign ownership and storage of participant data and the ability to process this data in a fully encrypted environment constitute a paradigm shift in user-centric data security.

Maya is investing in this new generation of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) software in order to stand up quantum-secure data storage and computing capabilities for all stakeholders choosing to engage with psychedelic technologies.

Maya’s long-standing relationships with prestigious universities, nonprofit research groups, and associations will form the origins of a DAO-like model for governance and stewardship of this aggregated de-identified data, such that individuals and facilitators can retain ultimate ownership of their data while being allowed to opt-in to a remuneration model.

#De-Psy (announced by Champion in his keynote speech at Davos 2022 — House of Psychedelics) proposes a decentralized gifting economy enabling the individuals under psychedelic research to benefit from automated remuneration in the form of Maya Tokens. Those with the means to afford psychedelic services (usually ranging in cost from $1,200 up to $25,000) will be able to redeem these credit tokens to finance psychedelic therapy and services for their neighbors, friends, family members, and others in need of financial support around the globe.

Summary

Maya’s team is excited and inspired to have Nillion as an infrastructure partner to create the world’s first fully secure private online network for researchers, providers, and recipients of psychedelic services.

This collaboration represents a significant step forward in leveraging cutting-edge technology to enhance mental health research and treatment practices.

More importantly, the partnership stands to inspire a new level of confidence and trust amongst the individuals, organizations, and governing authorities engaged in the psychedelics ecosystem.

We are committed to developing this innovation in service of a new era of universal measurement and real-world, evidence-based psychedelic best practices for net-positive societal change and human development.

About Nillion

Nillion is a secure computation network that decentralizes trust for high-value data in the same way that blockchains decentralize transactions, expanding the usability of web3 into new verticals and industries. Nillion is researching and deploying advanced privacy-enhancing technologies in a non-blockchain decentralized network.

Learn more by visiting the Nillion website or following us on Twitter, Telegram, or Discord.

About Maya

The Maya software system empowers psilocybin service centers at the frontier of this new market to operate safely and legally in the emergent marketplace for mental wellness.

In collaboration with leading researchers and providers, Maya has built the compliance, measurement, and client experience framework, maintained in coherence with ever-changing legislation, to allow licensed service centers and facilitators to spend more time and attention providing high-quality services for their participants.

Maya’s mission is to chart safe and effective psychedelic practices, in a quantum-secure and trusted digital environment, so that every human may have the opportunity to access modern mental health services, for the deepening of connection and expansion throughout society.

Learn more by visiting the Maya website or follow us on Twitter|X, and listen to our discussions with seminal figures on The Psychedelic Therapy Podcast.

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