youth-mental-health
(15)
Clayful
Clayful is a tech-enabled mental health company that gives K-12 students on-demand, chat-based coaching with a certified coach in about 60 seconds, across 133 languages. Founded in 2021 by Maria Barrera and Melissa Pelochino, the platform is purchased by school districts and free for students, aiming to make proactive mental health support a right rather than a privilege.
Hopelab
Hopelab is a San Francisco social innovation lab and impact investor founded in 2001 by Pam Omidyar. It works at the intersection of technology and adolescent mental health, combining behavioral science, youth co-design, and research to advance the well-being of young people ages 10-25, with a focus on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ youth. Best known for the cancer video game Re-Mission, Hopelab now runs research programs, youth fellowships, and Hopelab Ventures, which has invested more than $12 million across roughly 20 youth mental health startups.
InSite Health
InSite Health is a New Jersey-based behavioral health company building an integrated mental health and wellness platform for K-12 schools, families, colleges, and organizations. Founded in 2022 by Christopher Gaeta, it pairs a software platform with in-person and virtual clinical services - therapy, outpatient psychiatry, medication management, behavioral threat assessments, and school-based screenings - aiming to replace the patchwork of point solutions districts juggle with one holistic, clinically-run program.
Jaspal Sandhu
Jaspal Sandhu is a designer, educator, and social entrepreneur who became President and CEO of Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor focused on the mental well-being of young people ages 10 to 25, on January 1, 2026. Trained as an engineer at MIT and as a designer at UC Berkeley, he built his career around human-centered design in global health, co-founding the pioneering social impact design firm Gobee Group and teaching public health innovation at Berkeley since 2010. At Hopelab he has led investments in youth-focused mental health startups, raised millions for youth-led technology work, and built research and fellowship programs centered on Black, Brown, and Queer young people.
Christopher Gaeta
Christopher Gaeta is the founder and CEO of InSite Health, a venture-backed behavioral health company building what he calls a K-12 wellness operating system: one integrated platform that bundles mental health screenings, on-site therapy and psychiatric care for school districts that were otherwise stitching together six or more separate vendors. A 2023 Swarthmore College graduate and former co-captain of the golf team, he previously ran the campus-wellness company Grapefruit to 250,000 patients and worked as a healthcare venture investor before turning operator. Business Insider named him a top Gen Z venture capitalist, and he aims to build the nation's largest K-12 wellness platform by 2030.
Cartwheel
Cartwheel is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that delivers evidence-based mental health care to K-12 students through their schools. Working as a telehealth partner to school districts, it provides rapid-access individual therapy, group therapy, psychiatric evaluations, medication management, and family and parent guidance, with most care covered by insurance. By 2026 it had grown to roughly 350 school districts across 15 states, positioning itself as the largest school-based mental health telehealth provider in the United States.
Marble Health
Marble Health is a New York-based youth mental health company building a school-centered model of care. It partners with school counselors - not just school district budgets - to identify struggling students and match them with licensed therapists within days, covering visits through insurance including Medicaid. Marble combines individual, family, and group teletherapy with a purpose-built therapist EHR and AI documentation tools, and folds counselors and parents into a collaborative care team. Founded by former Headway co-founders Jake Sussman and Dan Ross, the company has facilitated more than 15,000 therapy sessions since launching and raised a $15.5M Series A in October 2025.
Jake Sussman
Jake Sussman is the cofounder and CEO of Marble Health, a virtual behavioral health company that embeds inside American schools to get anxious, depressed and overwhelmed kids into group therapy within days rather than months. He helped build Headway into a mental-health unicorn, then walked away to teach fifth-grade English at a Brooklyn charter school, where one overstretched counselor for hundreds of students convinced him the youth side of the system was broken. In 2023 he founded Marble with fellow Headway alum Dan Ross, betting that insurance-funded virtual group therapy, routed through school counselors, could scale care without waitlists. By late 2025 Marble had run more than 15,000 sessions and raised a $15.5M Series A led by Costanoa Ventures.
Joe English
Joe English is the co-founder and CEO of Cartwheel, a school-based mental health company he launched in December 2022 to put licensed clinicians and a HIPAA-compliant platform inside K-12 districts. Cartwheel has grown into the largest K-12 mental health telehealth provider in the United States, reaching roughly 350 school districts across 15 states after nearly 300% year-over-year growth and raising a Series B that brought total funding to about $44 million. A Yale graduate and former student body president with an MBA from Harvard Business School, English previously founded the LGBTQ-inclusion nonprofit Hope in a Box and worked as a McKinsey consultant on K-12 education. He grew up on a farm in rural upstate New York, an experience that shaped his belief that schools are the natural front door for reaching kids and families.
InStride Health
InStride Health is a Boston-based virtual specialty clinic that treats anxiety and OCD in kids, teens, and young adults ages 7 to 24. Founded by Harvard-trained clinicians from McLean Hospital, it delivers insurance-covered, evidence-based care - cognitive behavioral therapy with exposure and response prevention - through a dedicated three-person care team that coaches patients in the real-world settings where their anxiety actually shows up: school, home, the dinner table. The company has raised $56 million and operates across the Northeast.
Somethings
Somethings is a New York-based digital mental health company that connects teens and young adults (ages 13-26) with trained, certified near-peer mentors in their 20s for real-time text and video support. Built around lived experience rather than clinical therapy alone, every mentor is background-checked, certified as a peer specialist, and supervised by licensed clinicians. The company sells primarily to states, Medicaid managed-care plans, schools, and community organizations as an early-intervention layer in the youth mental health system.
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant, LCSW, is the CEO of Seneca Family of Agencies, an Oakland-based nonprofit serving more than 18,000 youth and families a year across California and Washington. She started as a counselor in 2001 and has spent more than two decades inside the same organization, climbing from direct service to running it.
Daybreak Health
Daybreak Health is a school-based teletherapy provider building the first digital mental health system for youth. The Y Combinator-backed company partners with public school districts across the United States to deliver personalized, clinically-validated mental health care to students - including teletherapy, on-site clinicians, classes, and universal screeners. As of 2023 it served more than one million students across 60+ districts and reported 81% of students showed symptomatic or behavioral improvements.
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.