500 Days Sober & Why I Invested in Sunflower

My dad is a psychiatrist. When I was growing up, he started an alcohol treatment center called Crossroads because he realized that for some of his patients, therapy alone wasn’t enough. They needed a place to get help with addiction too.

The summer before college, I worked the front desk. I answered phones, scheduled sessions, and watched people walk in for the first time.

What you learn quickly in a place like that is that addiction doesn’t care who you are. It shows up across every background, every income level, every kind of family. Most of the people coming through that door weren’t broken. They were stuck.

Last Saturday, I hit 500 days sober.

My own decision to stop drinking was quiet. No crisis. No rock bottom. My oldest son told me he didn’t like it when I drank. What I thought was “fun dad” didn’t feel that way to him.

So I stopped.

The benefits were hard to argue with: less anxiety, better sleep, clearer thinking, no low-grade guilt bleeding into the next morning.

The hardest part was answering other people’s questions.

 

Why aren’t you drinking?
Just one?

Are you sure? 

I didn’t have a great answer. I just decided not to.

What both of those experiences taught me is that a lot of people don’t need a dramatic intervention. They need something that works, consistently, over time. Something available at 7pm on a Tuesday when a craving hits and there’s no meeting, no sponsor, no clinician, and no one obvious to call.

That’s what drew me to Sunflower.

The addiction treatment market is one of the largest and most structurally broken markets in healthcare. Roughly 400 million people globally live with alcohol use disorder. Another 1.2 billion smoke. Tens of millions more struggle with gambling, drugs, and behavioral addictions. Across nearly every category, fewer than 20 percent ever receive treatment.

Traditional care is expensive, scarce, and often designed around moments of crisis. Meanwhile, addiction is becoming more always-on. Online gambling, prediction markets, social media, mobile gaming, nicotine, alcohol, and drugs increasingly sit in your pocket. Fast adoption. Real consequences. Not enough support on the other side.

Sunflower is built for that gap.

The product works like a daily practice for recovery: visual tracking where every sober day earns a sunflower, CBT-based journaling, an AI sponsor available around the clock, and a community for the moments in between. Underneath it sits a full-stack clinic offering therapy, medication-assisted treatment, and medical protocols.

The traction is real. Sunflower went from 200 to 100,000 monthly active users in under six months and reached $1M ARR in ten months. Ninety-four percent of users report reduced substance use by day 60. The company is already operating clinically in California and Texas and expanding nationally. The app is rated 4.96 out of 5 across nearly 3,500 reviews.

None of that happens without the right founder.

Koby is not building this from the outside. He lived it. He understands the psychology, the shame, and the daily negotiation with yourself that recovery actually requires.

He also knows how to scale. At Rupa Health, he helped take the company from $5M to $75M in revenue and drove a 4,000 percent increase in user acquisition.

When deep personal founder-market fit meets that kind of operating ability, you pay attention.

The team around him is equally strong. Sunflower’s VP of Sobriety is one of the largest sobriety creators in the world, reaching up to 100 million monthly impressions. The VP of Therapy scaled Charlie Health’s clinical team from 8 to 300.

The mission Sunflower has set for itself is one trillion sober days.

That sounds audacious. At the scale of this problem, it is the right way to think.

Ritual Capital invested in Sunflower in the fall of 2025. I’m proud to be backing Koby and the team.

Sunflower will become the default starting point for anyone trying to change their relationship with addiction, across alcohol, drugs, gambling, smoking, and behavioral addictions. Excited for what’s ahead.