Jake Cooper

The investor who decided therapists needed better plumbing

Jake Cooper runs Grow Therapy from New York, and the company he built with two college friends now sits at one of the busiest intersections in American health care: the gap between a person who needs a therapist and a therapist who takes their insurance. Grow's software handles the parts nobody wants to think about - credentialing, insurance billing, scheduling, the electronic health record - so a clinician can open an in-network private practice without drowning in paperwork. In 2026 the company closed a $150 million Series D, bringing its total funding to roughly $388 million and putting Cooper in the small club of founders trying to re-plumb how a country pays for mental health.

What Grow sells is deceptively simple: make "covered by insurance" the default rather than the exception. For years the standard experience of finding a therapist has been a series of dead ends - a directory of names, a string of voicemails, and the eventual discovery that the good ones are cash-only at $200 or $300 a session. Cooper's wager is that if you give independent providers the tools to accept insurance profitably, more of them will, and the supply of affordable care expands on its own.

That line is close to a company motto, and it points at the strategy. Most consumer health apps treat clinicians as inventory to be booked. Grow flips the relationship and treats the therapist as the customer. Take care of the provider - the billing, the credentialing, the marketing, the empty calendar slots - and the argument goes that patients get taken care of as a byproduct. It is a provider-first model in a category crowded with patient-first pitches, and it has proven durable enough to attract a run of blue-chip investors.

From Blackstone to behavioral health

Cooper did not arrive from a clinical background. He graduated summa cum laude from Duke University with a degree in economics, earned Phi Beta Kappa honors, and went into private equity, working as an investor at Blackstone and then Apollo Global Management - two of the largest names in finance. The move from spreadsheets to startups is a well-worn path, but the specific pull toward mental health was personal. Cooper has spoken about his own family's frustration trying to find reliable in-network care, and that experience of hunting for a covered clinician and coming up empty is the seed he keeps returning to when he explains why Grow exists.

He founded the company in 2020 with Manoj Kanagaraj and Alan Ni, two friends he met at Duke. Ni had worked as a product manager at Stripe and Google; the trio combined finance, product, and engineering instincts, and split the roles that a fast-scaling platform demands. Their early bet was operational rather than glamorous - they built one of Florida's largest behavioral health provider groups, learning the mechanics of credentialing and insurance billing from the inside before turning that knowledge into software other clinicians could use.

The staircase

Grow's funding history reads like a staircase, and each step tracked a jump in scale. A $15 million Series A led by SignalFire in 2021. A $75 million Series B. An $88 million Series C in 2024 that arrived alongside the launch of measurement-informed care, and brought Sequoia Capital onto the cap table. Then the $150 million Series D in 2026, led by TCV and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with BCI and Menlo Ventures joining and existing backers Sequoia, SignalFire, and Transformation Capital returning.

Cooper is quick to redirect attention from the funding line to the usage line. By the time of the Series D, more than two million people had used Grow, the platform had logged over 10 million lifetime therapy and medication-management visits - roughly 7 million in 2025 alone - and its insurance footprint had grown from 75 to more than 125 health plans, a reach the company puts at around 220 million insured Americans. Grow reports an 85 Net Promoter Score, says nine in ten clients would recommend it, and points to internal data showing 80% of clients see measurable symptom improvement within 30 days.

Where it goes next

The Series D thesis is about widening the front door. Rather than relying on a person to search a directory and find their own way in, Grow is extending the platform to employers - building seamless transitions from an employee assistance program into ongoing insurance-covered therapy - and to health systems, so that a hospital referral flows straight into a booked appointment. Each new channel is another entry point into the same underlying network of providers. Cooper frames the goal in blunt terms: an American health care system he describes as unaffordable and opaque, and a company built to make effective care easy to find, covered by insurance, and flexible enough to fit a person's life.

The Duke dorm and the first hire

Cooper's entrepreneurial streak predates the finance career. As a student at Duke he founded Maid My Day, a dorm-room cleaning service that he handed off to a new set of student leaders each year and which, by his account, still runs on campus. It is a small story, but he tells it for a reason: he remembers being nervous making the very first staff hire, and he uses the memory to level with founders who feel the same fear at a bigger scale. His advice to entrepreneurs tends to be practical and slightly contrarian - invest in quality design early because credibility is built visually before it is built at scale, test whether anyone actually wants the thing before you launch it, find co-founders you genuinely admire, and only chase the idea that would cause you real pain to walk away from.

Twice named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in healthcare, in 2022 and again in 2023, Cooper has become one of the more visible faces of a mental health tech sector that boomed during the pandemic and then had to prove it could last. His answer to the doubt is to keep pointing at the same two numbers: the therapists who now own their practices because of Grow, and the share of clients who feel better within a month. Whether the provider-first model scales without fraying is the open question of the next chapter - but for now, Cooper has turned a personal frustration into infrastructure that millions of people route their care through.