Ancestral Science and The Future

1. Summary: 4,000 years of indigenous practice in unity with psychedelic science.

2. What we do and how far along are we: Product, Therapists, Users, Results and Near Future.

3. The Science: Relevant Research on Ayahuasca and Microdosing.

4. The Psychedelic Industry and Our Way to Tackle it: Insights, Indigenous approach, Non IP-driven.

5. The People: A Peruvian Team, Shipibo-Konibo Ancestral Expertise, Modern Science Expertise, Community and Volunteers.

6. The Company: Non-profit, No Standard Health Requirements in Peru, Bootstrapping and Autonomy.

7. Business Model and Growth: Revenue, Pricing, Conservation and Sustainability.

8. The Larger Vision and How to Help: Consciousness Expansion Beyond Mental Health, Early-stage Fund for Indigenous Ancestral Scientists.

1. Summary: 4,000 years of indigenous practice uniting with psychedelic science

The field of psychedelic science is on a renaissance at what they call the third wave of psychedelic use. The second wave was in the 60s before it was made illegal, and the first wave was actually the indigenous practice of sacred plants that goes way back thousands of years ago.

Nevertheless, in this age, indigenous healers who are the actual stewards of this knowledge are not remotely taken into consideration when building companies in the psychedelic space and if they do, many see them as social responsibility components and have the good-hearted initiative of learning and giving back. But we shouldn’t just be “including” natives in our work but truly uniting and taking their practices seriously as real science. Including traditional approaches shouldn’t just be seen as a cultural or symbolic asset to account for our need for inclusion or to feel better about ourselves.

The Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous Nation, in the Peruvian Amazon, has existed for more than 4,000 years and is one of the multiple ethnic groups that have been experimenting with sacred plants such as Ayahuasca. Elder healers are constantly in states of expanded consciousness, and carry intriguing approaches about existence that are not limited to healing but that can find parallels in fields as cosmology or other modern sciences, in which humans, nature and the cosmos are strongly related and are acknowledged as one.

Panshin Nima, President of the Shipibo-Konibo Ancestral Healers Association, on how 2020 led them to further research and experiment with sacred plants, and making a call for unity between modern and ancestral science. (Video: The Bridgekeepers)

The complexity of this larger holistic perspective is by nature rarely integrated by scientists in the western world, which was a challenge that motivated us to start a team of founders and collaborators we call Endocosmic Foundation.

We believe if conventional scientific approaches and native practices truly look for spaces to complement each other, disruptive possibilities may reveal themselves for the progress of humankind.

Today, groups of conscious native healers from the Amazon are making a call for unity. To find together a path to help our world heal and develop, to use their ancient knowledge to work together on healing body and spirit, understanding reality, and achieving the much needed global change that starts with empathy, equality and acceptance of points of view, which are some of the gifts sacred plants can teach us.

In this way, Endocosmic started exploring this vision on early 2020 through Microhuasca, our initiative on Ayahuasca microdosing in non-ceremonial contexts, aiming to address treatment-resistant mental health conditions and nurture self exploration through an assisted process. Today, results show that 71% of our users accomplish their main microdosing intention during their first month. Intentions can range from “get better from my depression” to “be more focused at work” and are measured. Other daily measured variables show that in one month, they feel 54% more focused, 48% more self-sufficient, 34% more calmed, 21% more energetic and 23% more conscious of their spirituality, compared to their base lines.

Microhuasca is our first effort on exploring humanity’s future by building or backing initiatives around indigenous ancestral practices, expanded states of consciousness and sacred plants, and transition them to the lab and into the public.

2. Microhuasca - Ayahuasca Pill and Protocol: Product, Therapists, Results and Near Future.

2.1. Ayahuasca and Microdosing

Ayahuasca is a powerful psychedelic and healing brew used by Amazon indigenous natives by mixing two main ingredients: Chacruna leaves (Psychotria viridi which contains DMT, called “the spirit molecule”, one of the strongest psychedelics in the world) and the bark of the ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi which contains harmines and enzyme inhibitors that allow DMT to work). It’s mostly known for its traditional intake in specific ceremonies led by elder healers (Curanderos) who use the power of the brew and their sensitivity and ability to connect with other dimensions and beings to help people to deepen into their comprehension of themselves and of reality, to dissolve their ego and to heal by confronting physical or emotional conditions.

Microdosing refers to the ingestion of sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics, which confers users some of the benefits of these substances while minimizing the risks associated with a full-dose use.

2.2. Microhuasca

Ayahuasca capsules are currently made of pure concentrated ayahuasca brew.

In 2019, we started building up evidence on the benefits of the responsible use of Ayahuasca under a microdosing format. We have encapsulated 5% of a full ceremonial dose of the Amazonian healing brew which, through an assisted process of self-exploration, brings 88% of our users improvements in physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual aspects to their daily lives, even months after their experience.

We work bringing together traditional indigenous healers, neuroscientists, therapists, and data experts at the Microhuasca Community, building MVPs for monitoring and support protocols and facilitator training to enable a professional low-cost access to safe and approachable Ayahuasca treatments. Ayahuasca is a psychedelic that’s legal to use and distribute in Peru even without standard health requisites, which made space for quick experimentation opportunities.

2.3. Protocol and Therapists

In early 2020, we built our first MVP protocol for Ayahuasca microdosing. With no clinical members on our team, we manually encapsulated natural Ayahuasca and adapted monitoring tools from publications on microdosing other psychedelics so that we could launch and gather user data and feedback.

Soon, a diverse team of volunteer therapists joined the team. We value the insights we can get from different points of view, and made sure to build our protocols listening to perspectives from our team’s native healers, psychotherapists and alternative therapists. With their help, we iterate and improve our protocols by gathering in-field feedback.

In our current protocol, each user gets Ayahuasca capsules and a therapist facilitator who helps with human support for at least a month. Facilitators empower users to find by their own means what to work on and how in order to progress on their intentions. They follow guidelines built from best practices and our experience with Microhuasca users.

As of today, we had made at least 30 product iterations based on user data and one to one feedback. We talk to 100% of our active users at least twice a week, founders and main team members are also facilitators and provide services to users.

Given the nature of this type of product, we believe we’re far along in terms of getting insights from users and therapists alike.

2.4. User Data

Microhuasca users are required to fill a daily or weekly journal (bitácora). The data is used for research and to optimize intervention approaches for individual facilitators and users.

Data from the journal and Microhuasca’s analysis help facilitators decide on the correct intervention approach to help their users navigate through and achieve their intentions.

2.5. Our Results

Results from our users show that 71% of them accomplish their main microdosing intention during their first month (90% report they were on their way to accomplish their main microdosing intention at any given week). Intentions can range from “get better from my depression” to “be more focused at work” and should be measured, and we categorize them by Healing, Development or Self-exploration. Daily measured variables show that in one month, our users feel 54% more focused, 48% more self-sufficient, 34% more calmed, 21% more energetic and 23% more conscious of their spirituality, compared to their base lines.

Sleep quality usually improves for Microhuasca users. Ayahuasca as a full dose is well known to work on oneiric dimensions.

Complementary analyses preliminarily showed us that perceived intensity of the microdose seems to directly correlate to more transformational learning experiences related to self-comprehension (i.e. "revelations about the purpose or direction of your life"), profound thinking (i.e. "being more conscious about social or environmental problems") or augmented sense of connection (i.e. "new feeling that everything is somehow connected").

2.6. Other Assets

We started an experimental Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis Caapi) clone garden integrated into Fundo ‘El Bosque’, in collaboration with the National Amazonian University of Madre de Dios, currently growing clones from five varieties (negra, roja, amarilla, hembra, macho).
The team we built has relationships of trust with native communities and healer leaders in the Amazon of Peru and Brazil.

2.7. Next Steps (Near Future)

1. Growth, research and community development at a smaller scale within Peru because of regulations and quick user adoption/feedback.

Grow the Ayahuasca Microdosing business model and community in Peru.
Continue validating communal protocols where certain users can voluntarily help onboarding and supporting new users, like an AA sponsorship model. Even for healthy cases, users subject to monitoring and support protocols seem to have higher chances of making their changes permanent, and we’re validating the extent of the needed human component for this.
Experiment on our hypotheses on depression, anxiety and/or sleep. Publishing the first scientific article about ayahuasca microdosing.
Get native healers fully involved as a central part of our processes related to users and R&D.

This can take 6 months with USD 150k.

2. Software: We’re testing our Ayahuasca protocol with users and therapists trying other psychedelic or non-psychedelic periodic instruments to access expanded states of consciousness (i.e. san pedro (mescaline), psilocybin, holotropic breathwork) and there’s a clear scalable path for data-driven tools to multiply accessibility for efficient breakthrough therapies based on medical + unconventional approaches we’re studying (ancient, alternative, etc.).

We’re already prototyping this with volunteers “being the software” and helping facilitators as data assistants, which makes the product more effective than a stand-alone pill and support.

What we expect next:

Have at least 100 users using our protocol/tool for other instruments to access expanded states of consciousness and write software to support growth within this segment.
Further optimize our input model to gather significant and comparable data for research and support while being user friendly.
Develop predictive models as a base for an AI tool for “breakthrough therapies” based on indigenous practices.

This can take 6 months with USD 150k.

3. Metaphysics: Neuroscientific research, traditional knowledge and our own findings with users show an interesting correlation between accessing expanded states of consciousness and feeling “oneness with everything” and becoming more conscious or “better people”. We want to help humankind become more conscious by understanding all of this better.

As we keep getting valuable user data and insights on indigenous knowledge, we can further study the relation between consciousness expansion and the “invisible world”, hoping this leads us to better understanding about themes like ego dissolution, interdimensionality or the nature of reality. Time and money estimates will depend on which impressive (and dedicated) people we can get on board, and a consensus on interesting hypotheses that can actually lead to MVPs. We can gather scientists and thinkers and raise funds as soon as we decide to prioritize it.

Let's say this can take 1 year and 0 USD to get the conversation going, up to 2M USD to set up a dedicated MVP lab to test whatever we find out (if we do it in Peru).

*Timeframes estimated under the scenario we’d have the money available. If not, we’ll still do it but it could take more time or be less detailed.

3. The Science: Relevant Research on Ayahuasca and Microdosing

3.1. Depression:

In 2015, Flavia Osorio and team tested a single dose of Ayahuasca in depressed patients who reported statistically significant reductions of up to 82% in depressive scores between baseline and 1, 7, and 21 days afterwards as measured on three validated rating scales for depression. As observed with the HAM-D scale, the most significant score changes were observed for items related to apparent and expressed sadness, pessimistic thinking, suicidal ideation, and difficulty concentrating. www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1516-44462015000100013&script=sci_abstract. These results could explain our observations of users getting better mood, self-comprehension, focus and profound thinking.

The latter was also supported in 2019 by Fernanda Palhano-Fontes and team through a controlled trial testing Ayahuasca in 29 patients with treatment-resistant depression. Using the same scales than Osorio in 2015, they observed significant antidepressant effects of Ayahuasca when compared with placebo at all-time points. They brought new evidence supporting the safety and therapeutic value of ayahuasca, dosed within an appropriate setting, to help treat depression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6378413/

3.2. Anxiety:

In 2018, Lindsay Cameron demonstrated that Ayahuasca DMT increases at least at 50% the fear extinction for learning in rodents, which means they could move, swim and climb overcoming the anxiety stimuli they were previously exposed to. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7196340/

In 2019, the same author applied microdosing of DMT testing in rodents in both novelty-induced locomotion (NIL) and the elevated plus maze (EPM) paradigms, finding that DMT-treated animals did not display any behavioral signs of anxiety during the EPM as determined by the percentage of time spent and the locomotion rates once located into the maze https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6639775/. Both Cameron’s research publications could preliminary support our results on calm, focus and self-efficacy found in our users.

3.3. Cognition:

14 years of research led by Jordi Riba found that even a small dose (0.6mg/kg body weight) of Ayahuasca has up to 100% more impact on subjective effects than the placebo group, involving more affection, cognition, intensity, perception and somaesthesia, while volition scores don’t change significatively, meaning participants are able to interact. As for neurophysiological effects, two tests were conducted previous and after taking Ayahuasca, finding that one day after taking it, working memory was enhanced up to 30%, while executive functions (planning) up to 50%. https://youtu.be/H5pTYrUOAb4. Augmented self-sufficiency in our users might be partially explained by these results.

3.4. Harmines and neurogenesis:

Complementarily, Jordi Riba’s team found that only 10 to 14% of DMT from the Ayahuasca brew actually reaches systemic circulation, which shifts the concept of harmines from a minor role as only inhibitors (IMAO) to other key roles on the therapeutic results . Vanja Dakic’s team tested in 2016 a 4-day treatment with harmine over neural progenitor cells (hNPCs), finding out that 90% of them proliferate without DNA damage or cell death, which supports the idea of harmines as neuron generators https://peerj.com/preprints/1957/. The next year, research led by Jose Morales-Garcia, suggested that the stimulation of neurogenic niches in the adult brain due to harmine activity may substantially contribute to antidepressant effects, making it clearer that its ability to modulate brain plasticity indicates their therapeutic potential for a broad range of psychiatric and neurological disorders yet to be researched. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05407-9

3.5. General microdosing:

Finally, Vince Polito and Richard Stevenson worked in 2019 through an exploratory research with 98 participants reporting online their microdosing experiences mainly with LSD and psilocybin. They found decreased depression and stress; decreased mind wandering; increased absorption; and increased neuroticism. Although, the expected and most commonly discussed effects on media and online forums (creativity, wellbeing, mindfulness) showed no evidence of alteration. This suggests that the longer term changes identified were unlikely to be due to expectations. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211023.

4. The Psychedelic Industry and Our Way to Tackle It: Insights, Non IP-driven, Indigenous Approach.

4.1. The Psychedelic Industry

In the US, the FDA has been fast-tracking medical trials with substances like psilocybin (the ingredient in magic mushrooms) or MDMA (an ingredient in ecstasy) by granting them “Breakthrough Therapy” designations, which is setting the tone for a future of possibilities with legal psychedelic medicine in areas where more conventional therapies and mental health treatments have proven ineffective, after 25 years of stagnation.

The industry is fairly new and making leaps quickly, and more than 30 companies have gone public in the last two years.

Peter Thiel’s backed Compass Pathways (Market Cap: 3B CAD) are building psilocybin (magic mushrooms) therapy for treatment-resistant depression. They are backed by ATAI Life Sciences, which is positioning itself as a psychedelics R&D platform, with companies working in ibogaine, DMT, etc.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) raised 30M USD and had success this year with its Phase 3 clinical trial of MDMA for PTSD treatment. Investors include Bob Parsons, Steve Jurvetson and Tim Ferriss.
Startup Journey Colab raised 3M USD for an approach in decolonizing pharma with the Navajo.

4.2. On Psychedelic Products as IP-driven Pharmaceutical Companies

The largest companies in this space are structuring themselves to fit the pharmaceutical/FDA system because there’s just no other way, or at least it seems in North America. It also happens that the FDA and actually the whole drug discovery system like isolated compounds. Pharmaceutical companies are IP-driven and want to make everything synthetically and own it. They think about single compounds as patentable magic bullets, while there are very complex molecules in nature as is the case of Ayahuasca, and we should not be ignoring the power of multiple compounds working synergistically. i.e. Current companies like ATAI’s Viridia Life Sciences are isolating DMT but missing the full therapeutic potential of DMT+harmines from the full brew (see 3. The Science), not even talking about all the cosmology and ancestral practice that surrounds Ayahuasca which might hold a deeper meaning.

About Ayahuasca and patents, it is a plant-based brew that cannot be protected by IP. Someone actually tried it years ago and shit happened.

4.3. Our Early Stage Approach

Psychedelic companies, despite their rebellious nature, usually end up getting lost in venture building mode and will usually start too late launching an MVP with customers. The need for this “slowness” before launching is justified because mostly everywhere, research is mandatory and critical for safety before launching and testing a product and iterate on it.

We’re working directly with users first. While we work on formal research, we’re going through a more unconventional way of launching first and experimenting with ancestral safety guidelines, benefitting from regulations in Peru which allow this to happen with Ayahuasca even without standard health permits, though other countries such as Jamaica or The Netherlands also have flexible restrictions over other psychedelics.

Companies in this larger pharmaceutical and psychedelic therapy space start with a hard focus on the product, and we feel we’re ahead from other companies in terms of user validation, since we’re already shipping to users and have months of iteration behind.

We’d be cautious about pharma-minded companies stepping on the Ayahuasca or similar sacred spaces. For now, at least one of them has been interested in having us as advisors and we think there’s an interesting scalability with being a platform for psychedelic companies in general.

Still, we are figuring out how we want to navigate this when we develop more complex protocols, formulations and software, since we want the results from this to be open for the world to use.

4.4. On Indigenous Involvement in Sacred Plant Products

We’re tackling psychedelic products through the integration of modern science with ancestral indigenous knowledge (“ancestral science”).

In this age, indigenous healers who are the actual stewards of this knowledge are not remotely taken into consideration when building companies in the psychedelic space and if they do, many see them as social responsibility components and have the good-hearted initiative of learning and giving back. But we shouldn’t just be “including” natives in our work but truly uniting and taking their practices seriously as real science. Including traditional approaches shouldn’t just be seen as a cultural or symbolic asset to account for our need for inclusion or to feel better about ourselves.

Traditional healers from some indigenous nations carry a more spiritual and emotional approach to address mental conditions, to treat and heal their roots instead of their symptoms.

5. The People: How plant medicine, indigenous initiatives and the pandemic brought us together.

5.1. Our Team

We’re Alvaro Zarate and Adolfo Schmitt, Peruvians and cofounders of this initiative. We met 15 years ago through common friends in engineering student circles and started working on this in early 2020, a couple of days after quarantine started in Peru. Alvaro left his company and track record in the Peruvian startup ecosystem to work on this full time with Adolfo, matching with his experience on research and conservation initiatives in the Amazon. This “quarantine project” challenged us to work more than 60 weekly hours despite never having seen our faces with facial hair in person. Later joined Ayahuasca therapist Ana Platzer and transpersonal psychologist César Farías. The pandemic also led us to meet Panshin Nima, one of the most representative indigenous Shipibo-Konibo healers, as he got an internet connection just so he could meet us.

5.2. Ancestral Expertise: The Shipibo-Konibo Ancestral Healers

The Shipibo-Konibo are the Amazonian Indigenous Nation most globally known for their use of Ayahuasca, existing for more than 4,000 years. We’re close friends with the Shipibo-Konibo Ancestral Healers Association, main authority representing 120 members, and we advise them and collaborate through their president Panshin Nima when they need us. They are not used to structured project management and they were never formally organized before so they were worried about their association being two years old but not having done anything large to show yet.

Experiences never registered before from elder healers who treat COVID with sacred plant medicines.

When COVID-19 struck, the Shipibo people were one of the most affected in the Amazonian areas, with the highest mortality rates and entire communities where government help just wouldn’t reach. Some healer leaders started going digital and we decided to dedicate our time to help them with organizing a native healing brigade mission that is went to aid 10 isolated native communities.

Also, we got closer with other elder leaders when we helped document and analyze experiences never registered before from elder healers who treat COVID with sacred plants.

Our team currently counts with the collaboration of two of the most relevant leaders of the Shipibo-Konibo healer community. One of them is Panshin Nima, president of the Shipibo-Konibo Healers Association, main authority on this matter representing 120 healers. The other one is César Maynas, Chief of the Cantagallo Shipibo-Konibo community in Lima, probably one of the living healers with most experience in adapting Amazonian sacred practices to urban contexts.

5.3. Modern Science Expertise

We have a team of volunteer therapists (psychologists and practitioners of diverse alternative approaches). A neuroscientist collaborator is doing academic research about our Ayahuasca microdosing model -which might become the first in the world on Ayahuasca microdosing- and along with Adolfo and our science team they have years of experience researching and working with plant medicines from the Amazon and on forest conservation. We are aware that we will need a couple of highly awesome “magnet” professionals here, like we do on our ancestral team.

5.4. Community and Volunteers

We started as 2 people and are now 12. New people are volunteers (chosen out of 400), some we’d love to hire when we’re able to. They get to be users and also facilitators that help us aid more users. We now have 6 months of results and new insights from diverse volunteer therapists experimenting with multiple ways of facilitating users.

As founders of a non-profit working with volunteers, a great way we’ve been building our main team and find out if we were going to match with a potential team member is to have a “test-drive” with volunteers tackling smaller, non-pivotal but challenging projects and lots of freedom to find out how they lead and perform over a short period of time and then extrapolate. This may not be scalable for all future positions but it was what helped us get work done and avoid spending money in the wrong people for the time being. We give our team the chance to assume a role if they would be good at it, and we challenge and evaluate them on how much value they are able to bring into the table and ponder on how likely we’d want to be led by that person.

6. The Company: Non-profit, Bootstrapping and Autonomy, No Standard Health Requirements in Peru.

6.1. Bootstrapped Non-Profit

We’re funding this initiative from our own money and working independently as a non-profit organization, not married to any investor or institution yet. We feel it’s been a healthy call, we’re specially worried on big pharma’s colonialist influence could have on an ancestral practice considered sacred, so we learned to take advantage of our freedom to make risky decisions and iterate. Our team has found before that most investors or boards usually add negative value to a big vision and it’s okay to navigate this level of independence in our early stages.

To note, there’s been interest in early 2020 from a now public Canadian psychedelic company to buy half of of our company when we had 10% of what we have now.

We’re a nonprofit but if we were to take any upside from this, current cofounders have agreed to leave at least 70% for present and future team members and indigenous communities. We’ve talked internally on how vision is what matter most and the importance of building a solid team and network, so if it even comes to having to sacrifice for it to go right, we will.

6.2. The Privilege of Being Peruvian: No Health Requirements for Ayahuasca

We’re in a privileged position as Peruvians because regulation allows traditional plant medicine to be used without “FDA approval”, meaning we can offer Ayahuasca products to people anytime without permits or research requirements. There’s no regulation yet on Ayahuasca itself, which is why there are so many legal businesses like healing centers in the Peruvian Amazon. This is good in a short term for research and development purposes and early iterating with customers.

As we got more involved with the Shipibo-Konibo, we decided to fetch the opportunity to skip the usual long-ass academic research requirements to start delivering this kind of product to humans and just went right into launching the product and iterating directly with users through our MVP.

We’re taking advantage that:
1. In Peru, the Law for Pharmaceutical Products (Ley 29459, Art 12) allows for traditional herbal medicines, such as ayahuasca, to be distributed without a health permit.
2. In the 1971 Convention on psychotropic substances, Peru made reservations for Ayahuasca and San Pedro (mescaline), meaning it has exceptions to accept its use within traditional contexts.
3. In 2008, the traditional knowledge and uses of Ayahuasca were declared cultural heritage of the nation by Resolution 836/INC from the Peruvian Institute of National Culture. Also there’s a similar cultural heritage resolution for icaros (healing chants) on 2016 (068-2016-VMPCIC-MC).
4. Some leaders of the Shipibo-Konibo Indigenous Nation, known for their millenary Ayahuasca use, are part of our team and cook and facilitate our Ayahuasca product and service. As individuals, they are formally recognized by the government as traditional healers with an official statement. To note, Shipibos consider microdosing as a traditional but less known (non-ceremonial) use of Ayahuasca.
5. Plant medicine is normalized in our culture. We’re guessing that at least a third of grandmas in Peru today would recommend traditional herbal medicines to their ill loved ones instead of pharmaceuticals.

6.3. Peru as a Headquarters to Develop Sacred Plant Related Organizations

As for how we’re getting prepared, we have access to higher government or local industry connections to help pave the way through new regulations.

Also, there’s potential for partnerships with international organizations looking to work with Ayahuasca as medicine or for research. i.e. An international company currently in progress of getting approval to enable Ayahuasca research on healthy users has asked us to be advisors because of our cultural context and having the Shipibo involved. We plan to carry out similar partnerships when we get a better idea of our long term strategy and how it can responsible integrate with indigenous nations that use Ayahuasca (not just Shipibo) as a central part of the model.

7. Business Model and Growth: Market, Revenue, Pricing, Conservation and Sustainability.

7.1. The Mental Health Market

+450 million people are receiving inadequate first-line treatment options for mental health and neurological disorders (CNS Market Report, 2020). While 50% of depression patients don‘t respond to standard of care, global sales for antidepressants keep increasing exponentially over $14 billion since 2017. Effective low-cost solutions as Ayahuasca microdosing could significantly diminish the $16 trillion predicted global cost of approaching mental illnesses with current treatments for 2030.

7.2. Pricing and Revenue for Microhuasca

For most of the year, Microhuasca’s revenue came entirely from selling the microdosing program (capsules + monitoring/support). Current pricing: (1) Lite Program USD 85/month, (2) Full program USD 165/month.

On December 2020, we gathered our learnings and built an Introductory Training Program on Ayahuasca Microdosing Therapy (MVP) that is selling for 500 USD, as an initial acquisition channel for a prescription based model.

In the future, we’re planning to build an AI assistant for this kind of psychedelic therapy. We’re trying this out manually first, with our volunteers gathering and analyzing individual user data to help therapist facilitators ease their work and make more effective interventions with users. As we gather more data and are able to build specific predictive models, this can be sold and adapted for different psychedelic or non-psychedelic instruments for consciousness expansion.

Microhuasca started selling its product to a limited audience this year and also working with volunteers. From Feb to Dec 2020:

- 75 Users, 30% returning users

- 87% MoM

- Valuable users are engaged with their process and report daily in their journal. Most valuable customers (20% of them) volunteer to help us monitor and support new users.

7.3. How We Spend Money

Our average monthly spend is USD 176 (Bootstrapping). Full time founders and other team members are not being compensated yet.
Facilitation from therapists currently relies on manual volunteer support and monitoring. In the short term, this might cost around USD 30-50 per customer/month.

7.4. Conservation and Sustainability

About sourcing the plant product within the country, we have access to the main indigenous sustainable providers, which are often the same healers.
Growing Ayahuasca and Chacruna needs no deforestation.
In 2018, a study from Chris Khilam reported that in the main regions where Ayahuasca and Chacruna are collected, they are vastly cultivated in the traditional centers currently working with this medicine. This is a reaction to the irregular prices and qualities of raw material extracted for the market.
Yet so, there is a whole undiscovered genetic pool within Ayahuasca vines diversity, so our conservation approach goes beyond knowing that there are enough cultivated vines, but also towards ensuring that our clone garden is encompassing at least the most promissory Ayahuasca species in terms of power and effectiveness.

8. The Larger Vision: Beyond Mental Health, A Conscious Civilization, Early-stage Fund for Indigenous Ancestral Scientists.

8.1. Beyond Mental Health: A More Conscious Civilization Through Unity, Equality and Expanded States of Consciousness

Most people on our team have been helped or healed by Ayahuasca in ways modern science can’t fully explain yet. After seeing through it, we believe that progress or evolution of humankind might have to do with achieving a shift in consciousness.

Growing psychedelic use in controlled settings might bring a new batch of more connected, conscious or kind people into society. We’re talking about people who realize they actually don’t need that much stuff, money, resources, or energy consumption, and that months after a transformational experience still report feeling more connected with others and their environment.

Most of society is regulated upon humanity's inability to be conscious (https://endocosmic.org/blog/conscious-civilization). We allocate tools and funds based on the premise that we have to conform to a system where the component of less conscious humans won't allow for "in an ideal society" scenarios. There are many instruments to confront this, from educational programs to tougher regulations. Now, if you've had a strong psychedelic experience you may have felt your ego dissolve and that you are everyone and that everyone is connected and your perspective on life might drastically change. If we could truly understand what’s behind this and similar tools to access expanded states of consciousness, we might be on a path to fixing what we as a society might be doing wrong and is destroying us.

Also, this makes us ponder: What if every planetary civilization that progressed didn’t do it by generating huge amounts of energy and expanding outwards into outer space? Some people that had profound psychedelic experiences report accessing higher understandings of the universe or the nature of existence, and even a feeling of oneness with everything and “being the universe”. What if advanced civilizations expanded inwards? Sometimes we find ourselves thinking about this inner vs outer space exploration topic, and that long distance space travel might never be solved with a machine that occupies a physical volume in space and will never break the speed of light, but that we rather might through accessing expanded states of consciousness which importance on the progress of a species we can’t yet comprehend.

8.2. Endocosmic Fund and Accelerator

Ayahuasca and some sacred plants represent not only the chemistry but the integration of everything around particular indigenous cosmovisions, and we have taken the mission to help co-create responsible initiatives if we mean to take these teachings into non-ceremonial or non-indigenous contexts.

In this way, we will be launching and early-stage fund and accelerator to build or back projects related to consciousness expansion and indigenous ancestral practices with sacred plants. Our experience in building accelerators and our trust with elder healers will help making this a quick reality as soon as we prioritize it.

This past year we’ve been aiding the Shipibo-Konibo Healers Association on some of their amazing projects. We could as well offer them to create stand-alone projects together but it’s a delicate issue since it would mean getting involved as founders ourselves, and we’d rather give them enough independence and don’t fall into the inadverted/good-willed form of colonialism that they are tired of from social companies that usually offer to include them on “their” projects.

Here are some of their initiatives we’d rather help through our accelerator and that could be scalable to other indigenous nations:

Microdosing Ayahuasca has been a traditional non-ceremonial practice for the Shipibo.

Ego dissolution and collective consciousness: That sense of everyone being connected. Applications might help in fostering care, compassion and equality in society.
Interdimensionality: Accessing other dimensions or spaces through expanded states of consciousness. This might help us on applications for genetic memory analysis or space travel/communication (“inner space exploration”).
Unconventional uses of sacred plants: Applications of power plants used in non-ceremonial contexts to address treatment-resistant conditions or disease.
Music and healing: Shipibo healers are known to sing “icaros” in Ayahuasca ceremonies to access the spirit world and invoke healing power, diagnostics or treatment instructions. The traditional way of using Ayahuasca didn’t even require the patient to drink the brew, the healing came from the music alone. Applications might help in incorporating music as a healing mechanism.
One of the dreams of the Shipibo Healers is to build an intercultural hospital and research center with the best professionals from both worlds, and we want to help them make this a reality. The first step was building an MVP for a network of indigenous healing centers they already own and manage.
Some Shipibo-led healing centers are being enlisted to become emergency spaces for COVID treatments and also as research facilities, spaces in which they have always experimented with ancient techniques in a number of ways for modern contexts. This initiative will be connecting dozens of indigenous-based healing centers around Peru, implemented with protocols for remote communication. We are already gathering extraordinary cases, stories and recipes around secret and almost forgotten techniques or ways of life.
There are around 80k species of so-called “higher medicinal plants” in the Amazon we haven’t looked at with care. One Shipibo leader has started to make a database and categorize them according to their healing power for specific objectives.
Ayahuasca microdosing has been going on for a long time. Shipibo healers have been using it to treat diabetes, prostatitis, arthritis, osteoporosis, cataracts, whooping cough, cold, poor digestion, intestinal obstructions, gonorrhea, alcoholism (See interview above).
We are fighting together for Shipibo-Konibo practices to be acknowledged as real medicine, and we are connecting them with authorities in the Peruvian medical and scientific community to foster dialogue.

8.3. How To Help

If you’re a scientist, investor or enthusiast that would like to join or collaborate to the cause, please contact me at alvaro@microhuasca.com. Please share! We’re a self-funded nonprofit and all aid we can receive will help us go on.

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Álvaro Zárate is co-founder and CEO at Endocosmic Foundation, where they build or back initiatives exploring humanity’s future through consciousness expansion and ancestral practices. One of their initiatives, Microhuasca, works on Ayahuasca microdosing for mental health and self-exploration.

Previously, he’s worked 10 years developing entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems in LatAm and leading independent initiatives that helped build the Peruvian startup ecosystem. He founded Startup Academy, first private incubator in Peru, City Incubators, where they supported a portfolio of +2,000 early stage startups and Doer, smart guide for accelerators and related institutions.