Faisal Tai’s first location had a second job. It was also a beta site for software he had begun developing during his training. A business with a front door could give a computer program something a demonstration could never quite supply: a working day. There would be schedules, records, bills and the small administrative decisions that make an operation either bearable or maddening. Tai put the two enterprises together. The experiment eventually became part of the origin story of PsychPlus.
That detail is a useful place to begin with its founder and chief executive. The international acquisition arrives later. So do the expanding network and the executive appointments. First comes an unusually practical arrangement: operate a location yourself, and give your software a place to prove its usefulness. A beta test generally asks people to try a product. This one came with premises.
By October 2026, Tai was announcing another acquisition, this time in California. The distance between those two moments makes an interesting business story. It also leaves a question worth following: what happens when the person developing the tools takes responsibility for the organization that uses them?
A route through Iowa
Tai grew up in Houston. His education took him to the University of Medicine and Health Sciences in St. Kitts, where he graduated in 2013, and then to the University of Iowa, where he completed his residency in 2018. Houston remains the base associated with his work at PsychPlus. The route includes an island, the Midwest and a return to a sprawling Texas city. Geography has done its share of the traveling in this career.
At Iowa, he served as president of graduate medical education, with a constituency of more than 800 residents and fellows. Before the company’s expansion strategy, there was already a substantial group of people to represent. The role belongs in his story because it predates the corporate title: leadership had entered the picture while he was still completing his training.
His software project began during that same period. Professional training and product development were overlapping pursuits. The first operating location then gave the project a setting in which the consequences of design decisions could become visible. That sequence matters more than a tidy founder legend. It explains how the product and the operating business became entangled from the beginning.
The unglamorous machinery of Galaxy
The software platform is called Galaxy. Its remit includes records, scheduling, documentation and billing. These are ordinary nouns, which is precisely their appeal. A growing organization needs people to arrive at the right time, information to reach the right place and transactions to make sense afterward. There is little glamour in any one of those tasks. Collect enough failures across them, however, and an entire day can disappear.
Owning this machinery gives Tai’s business story a particular shape. PsychPlus has its own operating network and its own technology. Software development therefore sits close to the work it is meant to support. In business terms, that arrangement makes the relationship between product and operations unusually direct. The organization using the system can also decide what should change inside it.
There is an obvious burden attached to that choice. An owned platform brings responsibility for maintaining it, alongside responsibility for running the business. The appeal of control and the expense of control arrive in the same package. Tai’s career has continued along that route, with software remaining part of his executive remit as the company’s footprint has grown.
An organizational sketch, not a measure of revenue or ownership percentages.
Twenty markets on the to-do list
In December 2024, PsychPlus set out a plan to enter 20 additional markets in 2025. At that point, it counted 20 outpatient locations and more than 60 institutional partnerships. Its first locations and partnerships had opened in 2021 using Galaxy. Those dates provide a firmer sense of the company’s development than a loose adjective about speed.
The distinction between an ambition and a completed expansion is important. Twenty additional markets was a target. The earlier locations were an operating footprint. Putting the two side by side shows Tai’s company moving from a business already underway toward a much wider geographical project. A map is a pleasantly simple object until every new dot needs staffing, management and functioning systems.
For a founder, that changes the nature of the job. A single location offers proximity: the effects of a decision are relatively close at hand. A national organization requires other people to make decisions consistently across distance. Tai’s later appointments and acquisitions belong to that larger management problem. The original experiment had become an organization with more places, more relationships and more decisions to connect.
Tai was also taking the business onto the conference circuit. In October 2024, he attended HLTH in Las Vegas, where PsychPlus invited people to book meetings with him through the event’s app. The promotional artwork shows him in a company jacket, smiling beside the invitation. It is a small piece of the founder’s public-facing job: making himself available to people beyond the organization.
In 2025, he appeared in the opening episode of PsychPlus Perspectives, a company podcast that returned to the origins of the business. The first episode’s subject was the founding story. Even as the map expanded, the company was giving its beginnings a place in its public conversation.
The people around the founder
In September 2025, PsychPlus appointed John Hollinsworth as a board advisor. Hollinsworth had previously held senior operating roles at Acadia and Universal Health Services. Tai pointed to Hollinsworth’s experience building and scaling national operations. The appointment brought a career spent managing large networks into the company’s advisory circle.
It was an appointment centered on experience with large organizations. An advisor’s arrival cannot establish what happens in every subsequent meeting. It can show the kind of experience a founder chooses to bring within reach. Tai was adding someone whose previous responsibilities involved national operations, at a point when his own company was pursuing a wider footprint.
The current leadership roster also includes co-founder and chief operating officer Shelby Simpson, chief technology officer Peter Berkman and chief product officer Stephen Dunne. Those are separate jobs, with separate responsibilities. They help put the chief executive’s role in perspective. The company’s work is distributed across a team, even when the founding story begins with one person and a software project.
A Houston company acquires a London business
On June 23, 2026, PsychPlus announced its acquisition of Koa Health. The London-based company brought an international digital business, with a presence across Europe, Australia and Asia-Pacific. For Tai, the transaction extended the company’s geographical story well beyond a list of American markets. The acquisition price was undisclosed.
Tai had become a director of Koa Health Limited on December 19, 2025. The June 2026 acquisition announcement added a later public milestone to that corporate timeline. The two dates belong to different events in the same developing relationship: an appointment to the company’s board and the announcement of the acquisition.
There was a personnel decision inside the transaction as well. Koa’s founder and former chief executive, Oliver Harrison, became president of PsychPlus. Acquiring a company and bringing its founder into the leadership team gives an expansion a human dimension. An established business arrives with people who know how it works. Harrison’s appointment placed one of those people in a senior position in the combined organization.
The business logic is visible without predicting the result. PsychPlus already owned software that supported its operations. Koa added another digital business and international distribution. The company that began with a testing site was now buying capabilities developed elsewhere. Building and buying had become parts of the same expansion strategy, with Tai remaining chief executive.
“our commitment to technology and innovation”
Faisal Tai, in the June 2026 acquisition announcement
PsychPlus announces the Koa acquisition.
Oliver Harrison joins as president.
Another acquisition, another kind of scale
The next documented chapter arrived on October 23, 2026. PsychPlus announced the acquisition of Precision Psychiatric Services, a California organization founded in 2018. The announcement described an expansion of the company’s California network. Where Koa brought an international digital business, this transaction added an established regional organization and its existing relationships.
Seen together, the two acquisitions describe different routes to a larger company. One extends geographical reach through a digital operation. The other strengthens a regional operating presence. Tai’s task encompasses both. The practical questions following such transactions concern how the organizations work together: management, systems, local relationships and the division of responsibility.
Those questions also bring the story back to the beta site. Owning more of a business creates more opportunities to connect its parts, along with more parts that need connecting. An acquisition announcement marks a decision. The work of combining organizations continues after the announcement has stopped being news.
Four sports, and a very practical beginning
Outside work, Tai lists running, soccer, volleyball and golf among his interests. It is an agreeable range: running can dispense with a team, soccer and volleyball require one, and golf permits an elaborate conversation about a small ball. None of that establishes a management philosophy. It does give the founder a life beyond the organizational chart.
His public business story now spans Houston, Iowa, London and California. Its continuity lies in a recurring relationship between tools and operations. Early on, Tai opened a location that could test his software. Later, he brought experienced operators into the company’s orbit. Then came acquisitions that expanded the kinds of businesses he had to coordinate.
The first location remains the most revealing detail. There is something pleasingly concrete about a founder giving a software experiment a working address. The company around that experiment has become larger and more complicated. The original question remains useful: how well does the thing work when people actually have to use it?