youth-mental-health
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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.
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.
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.
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.