student-wellness
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Alex Alvarado
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.
Maria Barrera
Maria Barrera is the CEO and co-founder of Clayful, an on-demand chat-based mental health coaching platform that connects K-12 students with certified coaches in under 60 seconds. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who immigrated from Colombia at age 10, she moved from aerospace (Boeing, GE) into edtech (Nearpod) before a New York Times article about rising suicide rates in eight-year-olds pushed her to found Clayful in 2021. The company has raised $9.15M in total funding, serves 50+ school districts across six states in 133 languages, and frames mental health as coaching rather than therapy to reduce student stigma.