He runs a company on one stubborn premise: a young person who reaches out deserves a real human on the other end, not a chatbot. The market is finally writing checks to agree.
In February 2026, while most of the digital-health world was busy renaming itself "AI," Patrick Gilligan did the unfashionable thing. He raised a $19.2 million Series A for a company whose entire pitch is that the answer to a lonely teenager is another person. Catalio Capital led it. General Catalyst and Tusk Ventures, already on the cap table, came back for more. That brings the money behind SOMETHINGS to roughly $28.6 million, all of it pointed at a single, almost old-fashioned idea: connection.
SOMETHINGS is a near-peer mentorship platform. Young people sign up. They get matched with a trained mentor in their twenties - close enough in age to remember the territory, far enough along to be useful. The conversations happen in real time, by text and video, in the after-school afternoons and evenings when isolation tends to do its quietest damage. The teen pays nothing. States, Medicaid managed-care plans, and school systems pick up the tab.
That last detail is the whole trick, and it is harder than it sounds. Plenty of founders have tried to build something good for young people. Fewer have figured out how to make it free for the user and still get paid. Gilligan reverse-engineered the business from the person who needs it most, then went and found the institutions willing to fund that person's afternoon.
The numbers have started to behave like a thesis. More than 11,000 young people supported. Partnerships with 200-plus schools and 250-plus community organizations. And the figure that made investors lean in: 1,100x user growth over a single year. Gilligan is blunt about why the round came together. "Funding follows traction," he says, and he means it as a sequence, not a slogan.
"A teen in crisis needs a person, not a chatbot. We're built around that belief." Patrick Gilligan
Most support systems for young people are run by people who are decidedly not young. Gilligan went the other way. The mentors on SOMETHINGS are 20 to 29, deliberately close to the people they serve.
Mentors in their twenties talk to young people who recently sat exactly where the mentor once sat. Proximity earns trust faster than a title does.
The platform leans into weekday afternoons and evenings - the stretch when isolation tends to peak and most offices have gone dark.
No weeks-long queue, no clinical waiting room. A young person reaches out and gets a real human, in near real time, by text or video.
Every conversation is free for the young person. States, Medicaid managed-care plans, and schools fund the service through fee-for-service and per-member arrangements.
Partnerships span more than 200 schools and 250-plus community organizations, plus multiple state programs - including rural initiatives where an app reaches places offices cannot.
"Technology should make our mentors more human, not less." The product exists to put a person in the room, not to replace one.
The origin was not a deck. It was an experiment. Gilligan started by informally mentoring a handful of young people - a test, really, to see whether the kind of support he believed in could travel to someone other than himself. It could. The hunch grew legs, then a name.
What followed is a founder's story told in experiments rather than milestones. The team ran hundreds of small tests a day, the unglamorous grind of trying things and watching what happened. One breakthrough in growth testing cracked something open: thousands of monthly sign-ups, and the kind of curve that turns a meeting into a term sheet. The growth did the convincing.
Gilligan founds SOMETHINGS, turning an informal mentoring experiment into a company.
The platform launches publicly, backed by a $3.2M seed round.
A $19.2M Series A led by Catalio Capital lands, with General Catalyst and Tusk Ventures returning. Total funding reaches roughly $28.6M.
Gilligan frames the market in two numbers. The near-term opportunity sits around $31 billion a year. Widen the lens to everyone the platform can serve, and it stretches past $100 billion. But he is careful not to let the spreadsheet swallow the point: behind the addressable market is one young person, on one afternoon, deciding whether to reach out.
The goal he keeps returning to is not a valuation. It is a headcount: one million young people reached. Gilligan believes a number that large would bend the curve back toward where it sat in 2008. The six-month plan is the boring, correct kind - grow the product and commercial teams, open new states as demand pulls them in, and push into rural health programs where an app shows up in places a building never will.
There is a contrarian streak running through this whole story. The capital was flowing toward automation, toward the promise of software that does the work of a human for a fraction of the cost. Gilligan raised a sizable round on the opposite wager - that for this audience, the human is the product, and software exists only to get that human in the room faster.
He found backers who understood the nuance. Technology, in his telling, is not the rival to human support; it is the distribution. It is what lets a mentor in one city reach a young person in a rural county with no office for a hundred miles. The AI question, far from a threat, became part of why the round closed: the people writing checks could see how the tooling strengthens the position rather than undercutting it.
That clarity is rare, and it is the most useful thing to know about Gilligan as an operator. He did not chase the narrative everyone else was chasing. He ran his experiments, watched the curve, and let traction make the argument that a pitch never could. The deck, when it finally went out, was mostly a record of what had already happened.
It is easy to call a company like this mission-driven and leave it there. The more interesting fact is that the mission and the business model are the same object. Free to the teen, paid by the institution, scaled by software, delivered by a person. Get one piece wrong and the whole thing wobbles. Gilligan has spent years making sure the pieces hold.