The Profile · Founder Files
Joe English
He built the front door to mental health care where kids already are: inside the school.
Joe English · Co-Founder & CEO, Cartwheel
He built the front door to mental health care where kids already are: inside the school.
Joe English · Co-Founder & CEO, Cartwheel
Most healthtech founders chase the clinic, the app store, the insurer. Joe English went looking for the school nurse's office. Seventy percent of mental health care for young people happens inside schools, not hospitals, and that single statistic became the whole thesis of Cartwheel, the company he co-founded in December 2022 and runs as CEO.
Cartwheel does something deceptively plain. It puts licensed clinicians and a HIPAA-compliant software platform inside K-12 districts, so a teacher or counselor can refer a student to real care, track whether they show up, and watch whether they get better. No new building. No waitlist that runs out the school year. The care lands where the kid already spends six hours a day.
The model moved fast. Cartwheel started with two districts in Massachusetts. By 2025 it had reached roughly 350 school districts across 15 states and announced it had become the largest K-12 mental health telehealth provider in the United States, riding nearly 300% year-over-year growth in new district partnerships. The funding followed the traction: a $20 million Series A in 2023, then a Series B that brought total backing to about $44 million from investors including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, and Reach Capital.
He didn't build it alone. Cartwheel was co-founded in 2022 by English alongside Dr. Juliana Chen, a child psychiatrist who became chief medical officer, and Daniel Tartakovsky, who became chief operating officer. The division of labor is telling. English runs the company and the story; the clinical spine sits with people who treat kids for a living. As Cartwheel grew, it added leaders from across digital health, including a chief product officer who arrived from companies like Color Health, One Medical, and Lantern.
What the platform actually does is the unsexy connective tissue of care. A school counselor flags a student. Cartwheel matches that student with a licensed clinician for teletherapy, psychiatry, or family support, often without the months-long waitlist that defines so much of children's mental health. The same software lets the school team see whether the student is engaging and whether the symptoms are moving in the right direction. Care that used to vanish into a referral black hole becomes something a district can see and measure.
The system is broken: long waitlists, exorbitant costs, confusing processes, and technology stuck in the 20th century.
Cartwheel reports that 58% of its students reach full remission from anxiety, nearly double the 33% average it cites for traditional telehealth. English is fond of the unglamorous part of the work: measuring whether kids actually get better, not just whether they logged on.
English grew up on an old farm in Galway, a small town in upstate New York. Like a lot of rural places, it had one institution that quietly held the community together. The school wasn't only where you learned algebra. It was the food pantry, the health office, the after-hours gathering spot, the place families turned to when something went wrong.
That detail explains the rest of the resume. When English talks about Cartwheel's school-first design, he isn't reciting a go-to-market slide. He's describing the building that raised him. "I know firsthand how critical schools are for kids and families," he has said, "and that's a big part of what motivates me with Cartwheel."
He left Galway for Yale, where he was elected student body president and graduated in 2017. Then came a stint as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, advising on K-12 education, and a fellowship at the global education nonprofit Generation. Earlier still he interned at the Clinton Foundation and worked inside Yale's own admissions office as an interviewer and recruitment coordinator. Later he added an MBA from Harvard Business School. The titles change; the subject never does. Schools, and the kids inside them.
There's a tidy logic to the path that only looks obvious in hindsight. Consulting taught him how big systems actually move. The nonprofit work taught him how to ship something real into thousands of classrooms on a shoestring. The MBA gave him the vocabulary of scale. Cartwheel is what happens when you point all three at the same childhood memory.
In 2018, English founded Hope in a Box, a nonprofit that helped teachers build LGBTQ-inclusive English classrooms, often in the kind of rural districts he came from. The idea was almost analog: curated sets of inclusive books, lesson plans, and training, shipped to educators who wanted their classrooms to feel like a place every kid could belong.
It scaled to support 700 schools and 100,000 students across all 50 states. The work put him on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2020 and earned him a Jefferson Award for Public Service. It also rehearsed the move he'd make again: pick the place kids already are, and make it work better for them.
The two ventures rhyme more than they differ. Both start from a rural-kid's hunch that the school is the lever. Both ship something concrete to teachers who want to help and lack the tools. And both treat belonging not as a slogan but as logistics, a problem you solve with curricula, clinicians, and follow-through rather than good intentions. Hope in a Box was the prototype. Cartwheel is the production run.
Hope in a Box grew to support 700 schools and 100,000 students across all 50 states.
Named to the 2020 Education list; later cited by Forbes as a Top Health Tech CEO to Watch.
Graduates from Yale, where he served as elected student body president.
Joins McKinsey & Company as a consultant on K-12 education.
Founds Hope in a Box, building inclusive classrooms one shipped book set at a time.
Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Education.
Co-founds Cartwheel and becomes CEO; launches school-based mental health services in December.
Cartwheel raises a $20M Series A to take on the student mental health crisis.
Closes a Series B and becomes the nation's largest K-12 mental health telehealth provider.
With Cartwheel, I'm doing everything I can to help the next generation of kids envision and build a life they're excited to live.
Two organizations, one front door. Hope in a Box made classrooms more inclusive; Cartwheel makes them a place to get care. He keeps betting on the building kids already trust.
Cartwheel tracks remission, not just sign-ups. English points to 58% anxiety remission against a 33% telehealth average as the number that matters.
A company about kids in crisis named after the most unbothered thing a kid can do on a playground. Resilience, in one word you can do with your whole body.
Grew up on an old farm in Galway, a small town in upstate New York.
Elected student body president at Yale University, class of 2017.
Holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and advised K-12 education at McKinsey.
Recognized by Forbes twice: 30 Under 30, then a Top Health Tech CEO to Watch.
English's stated ambition is blunt and large: make high-quality mental health care reachable for every student by meeting them where they already are. Long waits, high costs, and clunky systems are the enemy. Schools, in his telling, are the fastest path around all three.
If the rural farm taught him anything, it's that the most powerful institution in a kid's life might be the one that opens its doors at 7:45 every morning. Cartwheel is the bet that it can do one more thing well.
The timing helps. American schools are sitting at the center of a youth mental health crisis that administrators name as one of their hardest problems, and the federal and state dollars flowing toward student well-being have made districts hungry for partners who can actually deliver care rather than another dashboard. English has positioned Cartwheel as the one that shows up with clinicians attached. The investors validating that read are not lightweight: Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, and Reach Capital all backed the company before it claimed the top spot in its category.
For all the growth language, the through-line stays personal. English keeps returning to the version of childhood where help was hard to name and harder to find, and to the conviction that a kid should be able to walk down a school hallway and find someone trained to listen. That is the unfashionable, durable idea underneath a fast-growing company: meet people where they already are. It worked with books. It is working with care.
Sources: Cartwheel; LinkedIn; Goodwin Law "1x1 With Joe English"; PR Newswire; Behavioral Health Business; Menlo Ventures; Reach Capital; The Org. Profile reflects publicly reported information.