The Operator Who Found His Mission
There's a detail in Matt Levin's resume that doesn't get enough attention: he's been a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago for over 20 years. Not occasionally. Consistently, while simultaneously running publicly traded companies and closing multi-billion-dollar deals. That kind of parallel commitment doesn't happen by accident - it signals something about how he thinks about the relationship between knowledge and action.
Levin started at First Chicago NBD (now JP Morgan Chase) through a prestigious First Scholar Program - a credential that announced serious ambitions in finance and strategy. From there, he moved through the world of human capital consulting, joining Hewitt Associates where he eventually ran corporate strategy. He didn't just watch the landscape; he shaped it. When Hewitt sold to Aon in 2010 in a $4.9 billion transaction, Levin was part of the small core team that engineered the deal - creating what would become Aon Hewitt, one of the world's dominant HR services platforms.
That merger was a formative exercise in large-scale organization building. The combined entity had billions in revenue and operations across dozens of countries. For someone with Levin's instincts - deeply analytical, globally minded, comfortable with complexity - it was a graduate seminar conducted at full speed.
"We can't afford to wait until someone is in crisis to act - we need to meet people earlier, with care that's proactive, adaptive, and designed to support the mental health of entire workforce populations."- Matt Levin, CEO, Modern Health (2025)
After Aon, he became EVP and Head of Global Strategy for the combined firm - then moved to Psilos Group, a growth equity investor focused on technology-enabled health care services. That detour into private equity isn't a footnote; it's where Levin learned to evaluate healthcare businesses from the outside, building pattern recognition across dozens of companies. When he rejoined the operating world as Chief Strategy Officer at ADP, he brought a sharper lens on what actually compounds in healthcare technology.
At ADP, Levin ran strategy, corporate development, ADP Ventures, and the ADP Research Institute. The Research Institute in particular - a think tank that published widely-cited workforce data - hints at an intellectual throughline in his career: the conviction that better data about people at work leads to better decisions about people at work.
Selling the Company - Then Doing It Again
In May 2021, Levin was named President and CEO of Benefitfocus (NASDAQ: BNFT), a benefits administration and technology platform serving employers, carriers, and brokers. It was a pivot from the strategy-and-investor role he'd occupied at ADP and Psilos - back into the operational seat, with a publicly traded company and a clear mandate: stabilize, grow, and create shareholder value.
He articulated a three-pillar strategy: strengthen the core, grow with intent, increase operational efficiency. By Q1 2022, he was telling analysts he had "never been more confident that our company is on a path to achieve sustained growth." And then, in 2023, he delivered the exit - Benefitfocus sold to Voya Financial. A clean deal. A completed mission.
Within weeks, he was tapped again. People 2.0, a global HR services platform enabling contingent and flexible work across more than 50 countries, named him CEO in September 2023. Different company, different model, same underlying pattern: Levin as the executive who steps in when an organization needs a clear-eyed operator to run the next phase of its story.
"Modern workplaces are undergoing a remarkable transformation. People2.0 has been ahead of the curve in this market and is well positioned to further expand its leadership role."- Matt Levin, on joining People 2.0 as CEO (2023)
Each CEO role has added a layer to his operating vocabulary. Benefitfocus gave him a deep education in benefits technology and the peculiarities of employer-insurer-employee triangles. People 2.0 gave him global operational infrastructure and the mechanics of flexible workforce platforms. Then came Modern Health.
Modern Health and the Proactive Mental Health Bet
In April 2025, Modern Health - one of the most prominent workplace mental health platforms in the world, backed by over $170 million in funding and serving enterprises globally - appointed Levin as CEO. Founder Alyson Watson transitioned to Executive Chair of the Board.
Modern Health is not a simple benefits-administration play. It's a clinical and coaching platform that combines evidence-based therapy, behavioral health coaching, peer support, crisis intervention, and self-guided digital tools - available in multiple languages, across global markets. The challenge isn't building a product; the product exists. The challenge is scale: helping the world's largest employers prove the ROI of proactive mental health support, and convincing HR and benefits leaders to move upstream - from crisis response to prevention.
That framing is exactly where Levin's two decades of benefits-sector work becomes an asset. He doesn't need to be educated about employer decision-making. He spent years on both sides of the benefits buy-sell equation. He knows the language procurement committees speak, and he knows where the actual friction lives in enterprise sales cycles.
His first major research release as CEO made the argument with data. A Modern Health report surveying 1,000 full-time U.S. workers ages 18-44 found that 79% had sacrificed their mental health to meet work demands, that 46% did so daily, and that 96% wanted access to preventive mental health support. Only 19% said they would seek help at the first signs of a problem. The gap between what workers want and what they actually do is where Levin has placed his bet.
Crain's. Davos. The Classroom.
Levin has been recognized in two notably different registers. In 2011, Crain's Chicago Business named him to its "40 Under 40" list - a recognition of early-career operators making their mark in the city's business landscape. Two years later, the World Economic Forum selected him as one of its Young Global Leaders, a cohort that typically includes heads of state, scientists, and founders building things at genuine world-historical scale.
Both recognitions speak to the same trait: Levin operates with a longer time horizon than most executives manage. He invests in understanding an industry before trying to reshape it. He builds relationships - at Northwestern, at the University of Chicago, at the WEF - that don't pay off in the next quarter but compound over decades.
His appearances at events like the Milken Institute Future Health Summit in 2025 reflect the same instinct: these aren't promotional appearances, they're working sessions with the people shaping the policy and investment landscape of healthcare for the next decade.