Birches Health

Somewhere right now, a phone buzzes with a parlay alert

By the YesPress desk - reporting on the company treating the addiction your phone keeps feeding.

It is a Tuesday night. A sports app sends a push notification - one tap to bet, one tap to lose, one tap to chase it back. Multiply that by tens of millions of phones and you have the fastest-growing addiction in America, the one with no needle, no bottle, and almost nowhere to turn. Birches Health exists for the person staring at that screen.

Founded in 2023 and run out of New York, Birches Health is a digital behavioral health company that treats gambling addiction and other process addictions - sports betting, video gaming, internet, sex and pornography - entirely online. No waiting room, no months-long referral chain. A licensed counselor who actually specializes in gambling disorder, a peer mentor who has been there, and a bill that runs through your insurance. By 2026 it is live in all 50 states and supporting thousands of patients.

America legalized a slot machine for every pocket

Since the 2018 ruling that opened the door to legal sports betting, gambling has moved from a destination to a default. The apps are slick, the odds are everywhere, and the whole experience is engineered to keep you tapping. What did not scale alongside it was care. Most therapists are not trained in gambling disorder. Most insurance journeys do not have an obvious lane for it. Most patients give up before they find anyone.

That gap is the company's entire reason for existing. Behavioral addictions hide in plain sight - there is no detox ward, no track marks, no easy diagnosis. A person can lose a house and still look fine on a Monday morning. Birches Health built the front door that the system never bothered to install.

*Figures cited from Birches Health's Pennsylvania program data, April 2026. Your mileage, and your state, may vary.

One founder, one wager: treat the thing the betting industry created

Elliott Rapaport started Birches Health on a contrarian premise. While the rest of digital health crowded into general therapy and anxiety apps, he aimed at the unglamorous, stigmatized corner everyone else avoided. The bet was that specialization plus insurance plus telehealth could reach a population that in-person clinics never could.

The capital agreed. In September 2025 the company announced $20 million in combined Seed and Series A funding - the Seed led by General Catalyst back in late 2023, the Series A led by AlleyCorp, with Will Ventures, defy.vc, Haystack and Operator Partners along for the ride. There is a quiet irony worth savoring: a roomful of investors placing a very large bet on the company built to end other people's betting.

Not an app that scolds you - a care team that shows up

The treatment is fully virtual and built around people, not push notifications. A patient gets an assessment, a tailored plan, and a multidisciplinary team: a licensed counselor who specializes in gambling disorder, group sessions, peer mentors with lived recovery experience, and - because addiction wrecks finances - a financial wellness coach. Most clients finish core programming in about 12 weeks, typically for a $0-25 copay.

In January 2026 the company did the on-the-nose thing and put it all on a smartphone. The same device that delivers the bet now delivers the treatment. After core care ends, patients move into the free Birches Recovery Network, because recovery does not politely conclude at week twelve.

From a 2023 idea to a 50-state network

A timeline with no detours - which, for a behavioral health startup, is its own kind of remarkable.

The case rests on outcomes, not adjectives

Marketing is easy; measurement is the hard part of behavioral health. Birches Health reports that 85% of its patients show symptom improvement, and an 81% decrease in problem behaviors after just nine appointments. The company calls its approach "measurement-informed care" - which is a polite way of saying it keeps score.

The institutional proof matters too. More than 18 state governments and 100+ insurance plans now route patients to Birches Health, and in April 2026 Pennsylvania's Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs signed on to expand care across the Commonwealth, with a focus on rural and underserved communities that rarely see a specialist at all.

Make the invisible addiction as treatable as any other

The stated mission is unfussy: convenient, comprehensive, specialized care for people facing gambling and other behavioral addictions. The deeper aim is to drag a stigmatized condition into the same lane as diabetes or depression - something you get diagnosed, get treated for, and get covered for, without shame and without a 200-mile drive to the one clinic that handles it.

That is also a workforce problem, which is why the clinician-training arm matters. You cannot treat a 50-state epidemic with a handful of specialists, so Birches Health is busy minting more of them.

The betting apps are not slowing down. Neither is the bill coming due.

Legal gambling keeps expanding, and so does the population it harms. The behavioral addictions that smartphones supercharged - gaming, internet, the compulsive scroll - are next in line for the same treatment model. A company that can deliver specialized care through insurance and state contracts, at the speed of a phone, is positioned for a problem that is getting larger, not smaller.

So return to that Tuesday night. The phone still buzzes with the parlay alert. The difference now is that the same phone holds a second option - an assessment, a counselor who gets it, a peer who has climbed out, and a copay that does not require a casino's worth of cash. The notification that used to be a trap can become a door. Birches Health did not stop the buzz. It changed what happens after it.