Omar Dawood

Omar Dawood spends his days on a question most healthcare executives never ask: what if the front door to a child's care isn't a waiting room, but a classroom? As CEO of Huddle Up - the company that was DotCom Therapy until April 2024 - he runs a network that pipes speech therapy, occupational therapy, school psychology and mental-health support into nearly 1,000 US school districts. The therapist might be three states away. The kid is at a desk. The session counts the same.

That bet is unusual coming from his resume. Dawood arrived at Huddle Up in January 2023 after a decade inside the most recognizable names in digital mental health. He was President and Chief Medical Officer of Ginger, helping grow it over six years before it merged into Headspace Health. He was Chief Medical Officer and Head of Sales at Calm, the meditation app that became a household verb. He ran commercial strategy and led BetterUp Care, the enterprise arm of the coaching company. Most people who collect titles like those keep chasing the same adult, enterprise buyer. Dawood went the other direction - toward children, schools and the unglamorous machinery of special education.

The pivot was less surprising to anyone who knew where he started. His path into medicine began as a teenager working through serious health and developmental challenges. That experience, the company says, shaped a lifelong commitment to making sure children facing similar barriers get the support they deserve. It is the kind of origin that explains why a man with a Wharton MBA would rather count therapy sessions than burn rate.

And he counts. In 2024, shortly after the rebrand, Huddle Up logged its one-millionth care session. The same year it closed a Series C led by Kayne Anderson Growth Capital, with continued backing from New Capital Partners, LRV Health, HealthX Ventures and OSF Ventures. The money has one job: push deeper into K-12 schools across the country.

The Huddle Up thesis is almost old-fashioned in its simplicity. Children don't get better in isolation, so the company builds a "circle of support" - clinicians, parents and teachers - around each student. The platform handles the logistics that usually break this model: matching providers, tracking student progress, managing IEPs and special-education compliance, and measuring outcomes so a school district can see what it's paying for.

Two things make the operation hum, and both show up in Dawood's metrics. The first is retention. In a field where therapist churn is chronic, Huddle Up keeps 96 of every 100 providers past the 90-day mark. The second is reach. A virtual model lets a bilingual speech-language pathologist or a school psychologist serve a rural district that could never recruit one locally. Distance stops being a barrier and starts being the product.

For Dawood, this is the through-line of a 25-year career: take a kind of care that's scarce, expensive or hard to reach, and engineer its distribution. He did it for meditation at Calm, for coaching at BetterUp, for behavioral health at Ginger. Now he's doing it for the kids who, in his telling, need it earliest and benefit most.