Mental health company Spring Health, cofounded by CEO April Koh and Adam Chekroud, is now valued at $3.3 billion after raising a $100 million Series E round.
The round was led by growth-stage firm Generation Investment Management, with participation from some existing investors including Kinnevik, William K Warren Foundation, RRE, and Northzone. Spring Health was last valued at $2.5 billion during a 2023 Series D round.
The AI-powered mental health startup matches patients with care providers, selling to both health plans and employers. What the company calls "personalized mental health" separates Spring from competitors in the digital mental health space, it says; its founding eight years ago was predicated on a research paper that found that machine learning could match people with the best care for their needs.
"We're really excited that this is another big growth round in a world where that seems kind of rare," Koh says. The company is also leaning more into AI—which it has always employed but didn't use to lead with. "We were an AI mental health company before it was cool to be an AI company," she says.
The attention the pandemic brought to mental health helped Spring accelerate its growth as employers sought to add mental health benefits for workers. Spring, which has about 1,200 employees, says that 10 million people have access to its platform, and it has 10,000 providers in its network.
At a $2.5 billion valuation for Spring, Koh, now 32, was already the youngest woman to run a unicorn startup . A $3.3 billion valuation places Spring and Koh near the highest echelon of female-founded startups, which include Melanie Perkins' Canva ($26 billion), Toyin Ajayi's Cityblock ($6.3 billion), and Rachel Romer 's Guild ($4.4 billion).
Generation first contacted Spring in late 2021, but the firm's growth equity partner Anthony Woolf waited to invest until the startup fell into its growth-stage bucket. The firm's investment thesis focuses on businesses that improve the world in some way, either through sustainability or, in Spring's case, health. Woolf was also convinced to invest by Spring's business model. "They deliver a service to customers. The service is incredibly high-quality, and it's enabled by an in-house proprietary product Spring has built," Woolf says. "This is a product-led company."
In this next stage of the business, Woolf sees potential for Spring to continue to penetrate the employee market as well as to develop greater clinical depth and specialty by treating conditions including substance use disorder, pediatric care, and acute trauma. Koh is interested in building out additional personalization for Spring customers, whether that's by stage of treatment or localization globally.
An IPO is likely on the horizon for the digital health startup as markets open back up, both say. "There is a crop of pretty high quality digital health businesses ready to go public in the next couple of years," Woolf says. He adds that Generation is supportive of an IPO "at the right time" for Spring but isn't in any rush. Koh agrees that an IPO is "one step along the way" toward building a "lasting generational business."
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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