Ophelia is a New York-based telehealth company making evidence-based opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment available from home. It connects people to licensed clinicians for medication-assisted treatment (buprenorphine/Suboxone), with video visits, on-demand messaging, and care coordination, deliberately removing the friction and stigma of traditional rehab. Founded in 2019 by Zack Gray after he lost a loved one to an overdose, Ophelia focuses heavily on Medicaid and rural populations and has raised roughly $68 million, including a $50M Series B led by Tiger Global in 2021.
BetterUp is a San Francisco-founded human transformation company that pairs certified human coaches, behavioral science, and AI to deliver personalized professional and leadership development at enterprise scale. It coaches employees at hundreds of companies and government agencies, blending one-on-one coaching, assessments, and data-driven insights, and has increasingly moved toward AI-powered coaching that runs around the clock.
Jay Shetty is a British-Indian author, podcast host, and former monk who turned three years of monastic life in India into the world's #1 health and wellness podcast, 'On Purpose,' which has surpassed 1 billion listens. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and TIME100 Creator, he is the author of two bestsellers, Chief Purpose Officer at Calm, and co-founder of multiple ventures including a production company and a talent agency. In May 2026, Netflix and Spotify signed a deal worth up to $100 million to exclusively carry video versions of his podcast.
Jamie Almanza is the CEO of Bay Area Community Services (BACS), a 70-year-old Oakland nonprofit she has led since 2010 - scaling it from a small mental-health agency into a 500+ person, $100M+ social impact operation that houses, supports, and prevents homelessness for more than 20,000 Northern Californians a year.
Brightside Health is a national virtual mental healthcare company delivering psychiatry, therapy and crisis care for people with depression, anxiety, and elevated suicide risk - powered by a proprietary AI platform and a 50-state clinician network, with coverage through major commercial insurers, Medicare and Medicaid.
Opya is a California-based early intervention therapy provider specializing in comprehensive, multidisciplinary care for children aged 18 months to 6 years diagnosed with autism. The company delivers Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), speech therapy, occupational therapy, and feeding therapy through in-home, clinic-based, and telehealth models across Northern and Southern California. Backed by $34.7M in total funding including a $15.4M Series A in 2021 from investors including SoftBank's SB Opportunity Fund, Opya is one of only eight ABA providers in California to hold BHCOE (Behavioral Health Center of Excellence) accreditation. In 2024, the company expanded into center-based care through the acquisition of Center for Autism Spectrum Therapy (CAST) and began operating under the Spectrum Pride brand.
Alex Alvarado is the co-founder and CEO of Daybreak Health, a school-based teletherapy platform that partners with K-12 school districts to deliver personalized mental health support to students. Inspired by his younger brother's struggle with depression and his family's difficulty finding affordable, accessible care, Alvarado launched Daybreak Health in 2020 through Y Combinator's S20 cohort. The company has since raised $25 million in total funding, serves 100+ school districts, and reaches over 1 million students nationwide - with 81% showing clinical improvements in anxiety and depression assessments. Alvarado grew up in Seattle as the oldest of five children to educator parents, attended Stanford University where he studied economics and public policy, and went on to work at the U.S. Treasury, Kaiser Family Foundation, Oliver Wyman, and Castlight Health before founding Daybreak.
Bask Gill is the Co-Founder of Power (withpower.com), a San Francisco-based clinical trial platform that uses AI to match patients with clinical trials. After watching his father struggle to navigate a broken clinical trial discovery system following a multiple myeloma diagnosis, Bask co-founded Power in May 2021 alongside Brandon Li. The platform has connected over 600,000 patients to trials across 10,000+ medical conditions, with 40% being non-white patients - a deliberate focus on diversity and access. Power has raised $19M in funding including a $12M Series A in early 2024, and grown to 230 employees.
Christina Sanders, M.A., BCBA is the Chief Executive Officer of Opya (rebranded as Spectrum Pride), a California-based autism early intervention therapy provider delivering ABA, speech, occupational, and feeding therapy to young children. A Board Certified Behavior Analyst with a Master's from Ball State University, she rose from VP of ABA Clinical Operations to CEO, overseeing a company that has raised $34.7M in venture funding, earned BHCOE 3-year accreditation, and expanded across Northern and Southern California to serve over 110 employees and thousands of families.
Matt Levin is the CEO of Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform. A serial CEO with two decades of leadership across HR technology, health care, and benefits, Levin has helmed Benefitfocus (sold to Voya Financial), People 2.0 (a 50-country HR platform), and held C-suite roles at ADP and Aon. He was part of the core team that engineered the landmark $4.9 billion Aon-Hewitt merger and was recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. A Chicago-based operator and longtime lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he now leads Modern Health's mission to bring proactive, globally equitable mental health care to the world's workforce.
Grace Chang is the Taiwanese-American founder and CEO of Kintsugi, the Berkeley-based startup that built AI capable of detecting clinical depression and anxiety from just 20 seconds of free-form speech. A five-time entrepreneur with roots in signal processing and consumer tech, she raised $28 million, launched Japan's default mental health screener, and built the world's largest annotated voice dataset for mental health machine learning - before making all of Kintsugi's research and technology open source in early 2026 after FDA regulatory hurdles made the venture-backed model unsustainable.
Yash M. Patel is the Co-Founder and CEO of Legion Health, a San Francisco-based AI-native mental health platform that delivers insurance-covered psychiatric care via telehealth. A Princeton mathematics graduate (2018) and Y Combinator alum (S21), Yash previously worked as a healthcare policy analyst at the Congressional Budget Office and as a research assistant at Harvard Medical School. Motivated in part by his experience caregiving for his father, he co-founded Legion Health in 2021 alongside Princeton classmates Arthur MacWaters and Daniel Wilson. The company has raised over $10M, and in April 2026 became the first startup to receive regulatory authorization to let AI prescribe psychiatric medications.
Elinor (Wen-Hsin) Huang is the Founder and CEO of MEandMine, a San Jose-based AI-powered mental health platform for K-12 students that uses gamified, neuroscience-backed tools to help children build emotional regulation skills before crises emerge. Motivated by the loss of an MIT classmate to suicide and the 11-year average gap between symptom onset and treatment, she built MEandMine into a certified B Corp with partnerships spanning Google, Stanford Medicine, and the NYC Department of Education, and raised $6.6M in venture funding including a $4.5M round in June 2024.
Samantha Walter is a Healthcare Partner on the Bio + Health team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she helps portfolio companies grow by building strategic partnerships across the care delivery ecosystem - payors, providers, employers, and retail. A University of Wisconsin-Madison finance graduate originally from Minneapolis, she brings deep operational credibility to the VC world: before joining a16z, she built a Direct Contracting Entity at Carelon (then CareMore/Aspire under Anthem/Elevance) in 2020, drove customer success at Quartet Health, and cut her teeth as a healthcare revenue cycle consultant at Huron Consulting Group in New York City. She lives and works in NYC, bridging Silicon Valley capital with real-world healthcare infrastructure.
Don Vaughn, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampa Health, a Palo Alto-based neurotechnology company building FDA-cleared portable TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) devices that compress 36 days of depression treatment into a single day. A Stanford-educated physicist turned UCLA neuroscientist, Vaughn has built a career at the intersection of brain science, machine learning, and accessibility - detoured, notably, through a DJ career that landed him a #28 iTunes Dance chart hit featuring Nick Lachey. His TEDx talk on neurohacking has surpassed one million views. Ampa raised an oversubscribed $8.5M pre-A round in October 2025, achieved FDA clearance for its Ampa One device in February 2025, and is targeting 5,000 patient remissions by end of 2026 - with a long-term audacious goal of a billion remissions in ten years.
Anarghya Vardhana is a venture partner at Maveron, the consumer-only VC firm co-founded by Howard Schultz, where she has spent nearly a decade backing iconic consumer brands in health, wellness, and social tech. A Stanford grad who published a math theorem at 17, she moved from Sandia National Labs nuclear research to Google international ops to the boardrooms of startups like Co-Star, Bend Health, and Alife. Forbes named her a 30 Under 30 in VC and their First Diversity Champion across the entire class. Simultaneously serving as Investor in Residence at Vanta, she is one of the few investors who credibly bridges deep technical rigor with consumer intuition - and who also runs trail marathons and dances Bharatanatyam.
Alex Lieberman co-founded Morning Brew out of a University of Michigan dorm room in 2015 and grew it from 40 campus subscribers to 4+ million before selling a majority stake to Axel Springer's Insider Inc. for ~$75 million in 2020. Since stepping back as CEO at 28, he has reinvented himself as a multi-company builder, launching Storyarb (a B2B content agency hitting mid-7-figures), Tenex (AI strategy for enterprises), GrowthPair (marketing talent), and Distro (an AI content platform), while hosting the Founder's Journal podcast and building one of the most transparent creator brands in business media.
Corey Wilks, Psy.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist turned executive coach, speaker, and creator based in Austin, TX. After 15 years in clinical psychology, he left the field following a near-death experience during the pandemic and being fired from a remote therapy position, pivoting to help founders and creators remove the psychological bottlenecks costing them business growth. He runs Creator Alchemy - a newsletter, podcast, and community - and is known for his Four Horsemen of Fear framework. His coaching clients include VC-backed founders, CEOs, and bootstrapped entrepreneurs across AI, tech, CPG, and media.
Peter Burton is a California-based Christian singer-songwriter and worship pastor at Bayside Church in Sacramento who turned his private battle with anxiety and panic into chart-topping music. Signed to Integrity Music in early 2025 and managed by Matthew West's Story House Collective, he debuted with 'Where Would I Be' - a song born from his mental health journey - which hit #1 on Billboard Christian AC and #1 on Mediabase Christian AC. Named the only Christian artist on Pandora's Artists to Watch 2026 (The Pandora Ten, #4 overall), he achieved a +1,980% increase in Pandora spins since April 2025, with over 19.9 million total U.S. streams and 659,000 Spotify monthly listeners.
Freddie deBoer is an American author, cultural critic, and PhD-wielding contrarian who has spent 17 years making everyone on the internet uncomfortable - including people who agree with him. A self-described Marxist who despises most of the left, his Substack newsletter 'cool but rude' has over 67,000 subscribers hungry for unvarnished takes on education, identity politics, media dysfunction, and mental illness. Author of three books - The Cult of Smart (2020), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), and debut novel The Mind Reels (2025) - deBoer writes with the conviction of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Mark Manson is a three-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, blogger, and podcaster whose books have sold approximately 20 million copies worldwide across 65+ languages. Known for his brutally honest, profanity-laced take on self-help, his breakout book 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' spent over 279 weeks on the NYT bestseller list and was adapted into a documentary by Universal Pictures in 2023. He runs a popular weekly newsletter, an AI-powered coaching app called Purpose, and the podcast 'SOLVED with Mark Manson.'