She was not supposed to be building a behavioral health company. A Harvard MBA, a USC-trained engineer, a former Boston Consulting Group strategist who had spent two decades advising pharma giants and insurance conglomerates - Malekeh Amini had a perfectly respectable career track laid out in front of her. Then her son got sick, and everything she thought she understood about the American mental health system fell apart.
Navigating her son's complex neurological and psychiatric needs was not just difficult - it was a full exposure to how the system actually works: fragmented, inequitable, impossible to coordinate. No single clinician had the full picture. Data lived in silos. Referrals expired. The best treatments existed somewhere, just not in a form any of his providers could easily reach. Malekeh did not write a blog post about it. She built a company.
We needed to design a system that was structured around patients, and the providers who cared for them, in order to improve outcomes, and consequently, reduce cost of care across the ecosystem.
- Malekeh Amini, Founder & CEO, Trayt Health
Trayt Health started in 2013 - under the names Project XXIII, then PediaConnect, then AVA Health - before finding its current form as a patient-centric, clinician-directed technology platform for behavioral health state programs and health plans. Today it is the incumbent infrastructure for behavioral health access across 25 statewide programs, connecting 30,000+ providers across 24 health systems and covering more than 10 million lives. That is not a startup metric. That is a national utility.
The Company the System Didn't Know It Needed
Ask most people what behavioral health technology looks like and they will describe a consumer app for meditation or teletherapy. Trayt is something different: backend infrastructure for the institutions doing the coordinating. State governments. Health plans. Hospital systems. The entities that actually govern how people move through the mental health care system - or fail to.
The platform does four things. It standardizes psychiatric consultation workflows so primary care providers can connect with behavioral health specialists without burning a referral. It coordinates care with built-in measurement tools so outcomes are tracked in real time. It analyzes program data at the population level so states can see what is actually working. And it generates clinical insights - not dashboards for administrators, but actionable signals for clinicians making decisions on individual patients.
Trayt Health was selected by KyCOMPASS in April 2026 to digitally power Kentucky's statewide maternal mental health access program - connecting obstetric and primary care providers with psychiatric consultation services across the state.
The KyCOMPASS contract is a signal of where Malekeh is pointing the company. Maternal mental health is one of the most underfunded, underdiagnosed, and consequential areas in American healthcare. It is a problem that starts before pregnancy, compounds after delivery, and ripples across families for years. The behavioral health infrastructure most states use was not designed for it. Trayt's platform is.
The 90-90-90 Vision
Malekeh does not talk in terms of quarterly targets. She talks in terms of a decade-long transformation. The framework she has aligned with - drawn from the Kennedy Forum's ambition for American mental health - is simple and audacious: 90% of Americans screened for mental health conditions. 90% with access to evidence-based treatment. 90% achieving measurable recovery outcomes. By 2033.
That is not marketing language. For Malekeh, it is a structural target - the kind that only becomes real if the data infrastructure exists to measure it. Trayt's entire architecture is designed around making those measurements possible at population scale, in real time, with clinical fidelity. Not approximate. Not retrospective. Now.
A Resume That Defies Easy Summary
Before Trayt, the career arc was anything but linear. At USC she collected two bachelor's degrees - one in Communications and Cognitive Science, one in Computer Science - followed by a master's in Systems Engineering from the same institution. She then went to Harvard for her MBA, which led directly into consulting at the Boston Consulting Group and the Parthenon Group, where she spent years advising pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, hospital networks, and health insurance organizations on strategy.
The through-line was always healthcare. The jump to Base Health - where she served as Senior Vice President of Products and Business Development - took her from advisor to operator. She was no longer mapping the landscape; she was building the roads.
Trayt was the next leap. This time she was not just an operator. She was the founder, the chief architect, the one explaining to investors why the behavioral health data infrastructure problem was both completely tractable and completely unsolved.
"The right treatment, at the right time, wherever the patients are."
- Malekeh Amini's founding vision for Trayt Health
The Person Behind the Platform
She runs a company with 28 employees and the operational reach of something ten times its size. She is a single parent whose daughter - a UC Berkeley economics graduate with a data science minor - now works as an equity research analyst at JP Morgan in New York. Her son, a freshman at American University studying psychology and public health, has released original music on major streaming platforms. They are, in the truest sense, their mother's children: empirical and creative in equal measure.
Outside of work, she is a tennis player, an art collector, and someone who takes culinary arts seriously - all pursuits that require patience, precision, and the ability to execute under pressure. None of this is incidental. It is the same disposition she brings to building software that has to work for a state government before it works for a patient.
Malekeh sits on the fundraising board of Baylor College of Medicine and serves as Chairman of the Board at Wings Learning Center in Redwood City - a non-public school for students with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities. She is also the Fund Chair for her class at Harvard Business School. The board work is not decorative. It is continuous application of the same analytical attention she gives her company, directed at institutions that matter to her personally.
The Fourth Name Is the One That Stuck
Few investors ask about the three prior names. Trayt Health was born as Project XXIII, then became PediaConnect, then AVA Health. Each rebranding was a refinement - a sharper understanding of the market the platform was actually serving. By the time it became Trayt, the company had discovered something more durable than a consumer app for anxious parents: it had become the coordination layer that state governments and health plans needed to make their behavioral health programs function.
The April 2026 funding round - $7.17 million from DigitalDx Ventures and Vajra Investments - reflects that positioning. This was not a pivot bet. It was a vote of confidence in a platform that already has 25 statewide programs running on it, with real clinical outcomes data to show for it.
While social programs have some impact, many people still suffer because it takes a much more targeted and patient-specific effort to address the social determinants of health issues that are impacting someone's mental health.
- Malekeh Amini, Healthcare IT Today interview
The social determinants argument is central to Trayt's clinical logic. Mental health does not happen in isolation from housing, food security, community stability, or whether someone can afford to take time off work. The platform's approach to precision diagnostics deliberately incorporates social determinants data - not as a compliance checkbox, but as clinically meaningful signal. A diagnosis without context is a guess dressed up as medicine. Malekeh does not build guesses.
What Comes Next
The KyCOMPASS maternal mental health program is the clearest signal of where Trayt is heading: deeper into underserved program areas where the gap between care supply and care demand is widest. School-based mental health. Rural access. Maternal care. Autism and ADHD programs. These are not growth markets in the traditional venture sense. They are the places where the failure of the existing system costs the most - to individuals, to families, and to the governments paying for the downstream consequences of untreated illness.
Malekeh Amini is not racing to be the best consumer mental health app. She is building the infrastructure that makes every part of the system work better - quietly, systematically, at scale. The kind of work that rarely gets a TechCrunch headline but shows up in a statewide procurement contract signed in Frankfort, Kentucky on a Tuesday in April 2026.
That is the job. She is doing it.
