What are the top startups in the mental health market?
In our mental health market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
Spring Health is the top mental health startup today, with Grow Therapy and Headway behind it; Lyra Health, Talkiatry and Rula form the next strongest group.
The ranking looks very different once old unicorn valuations stop doing most of the work. Current revenue, profitability, provider scale, payer relationships and care delivery now tell us much more about who is actually pulling ahead.
Insurance has become one of the market's biggest competitive advantages. BetterHelp's consumer revenue is shrinking while its insurance-covered revenue is growing quickly, and the companies with the strongest momentum are increasingly built around reimbursement rather than around cash-pay subscriptions.
Spring Health stands out because the Alma acquisition connects two sides of the market that are usually separate: employer and health-plan distribution on one side, and provider insurance and practice infrastructure on the other. The combined business is also targeting roughly $1 billion of revenue while remaining EBITDA profitable.
Grow Therapy has the clearest commercial acceleration. Revenue increased from $3.6 million in 2021 to $617.4 million in 2024, which means the company has already moved well beyond the stage where extreme growth can be dismissed as a tiny-base effect.
Headway's 65,000-plus-provider network is probably the strongest supply-side position in the category, but it also shows why provider counts need context. A large enabled network is not economically equivalent to an employed psychiatrist workforce, completed patient visits or recognized revenue.
The most defensible niches are increasingly the ones that are hardest to operate. Talkiatry has built a large employed psychiatry workforce, while Charlie Health has scaled virtual intensive outpatient care; both models carry more operational complexity, but that complexity also makes them harder to copy.
Headspace and Calm are not disappearing. They are being pulled toward employers, insurers and health-plan distribution, with Headspace moving further into actual care delivery and Calm remaining more concentrated on engagement, navigation and consumer reach.
AI is helping the leaders more as an operating tool than as a replacement for clinicians. Across Grow, Rula and Lyra, the most convincing results are coming from documentation, triage, matching and administrative work that frees up scarce provider time.
The broader pattern is that the winners are becoming infrastructure inside the healthcare system. The companies moving up the ranking are not simply attracting users; they are organizing clinicians, reimbursement, distribution, care delivery and increasingly the software around each appointment.
This market map, featured in our mental health market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the mental health market
What does “top mental health startup” mean today?
Today, we think the most useful way to rank mental health startups is by current operating power, because several famous unicorn valuations are now years old and tell us surprisingly little about who is actually pulling ahead.
That distinction changes the ranking quite a lot. Lyra Health reached a $5.58 billion valuation during the 2021-2022 digital-health boom, while newer companies such as Grow Therapy have since produced much fresher evidence of scale. Grow went from $3.6 million of revenue in 2021 to $617.4 million in 2024, according to the Financial Times and Statista. Headway, meanwhile, has built a network of more than 65,000 mental health providers. Spring Health has acquired Alma and is now targeting roughly $1 billion of combined revenue over the next 12 months.
Those companies also compete in different businesses. Talkiatry employs psychiatrists. Headway helps independent clinicians take insurance. Charlie Health runs intensive outpatient programs. Headspace still has a large consumer product but increasingly sells through employers and insurers.
So we give more weight to what a company controls today: patients, providers, payer relationships, distribution and actual care delivery. Funding and valuation still help, particularly when the financing is recent, but an old unicorn price alone carries much less weight these days.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest mental health market report.
Are mental health apps still where the real growth is?
The strongest momentum in mental health today is coming from insurance-connected care companies, while the old cash-pay consumer model is having a much harder time.
BetterHelp gives us an unusually clean test because Teladoc publishes detailed financial results. In its latest quarterly filing, BetterHelp revenue fell 12% year over year to $212.6 million and monthly paying users fell 11%. The split underneath those numbers is even more interesting: revenue from the traditional consumer business fell 20%, while insurance-covered revenue jumped from about $2.1 million to $21.8 million.
That insurance business grew more than tenfold in a year and BetterHelp still could not fully capture the demand. Teladoc said demand for insured therapy had moved faster than expected and available therapist capacity was too limited. The company consequently accelerated its nationwide insurance rollout.
We see the same direction elsewhere, without the same deterioration. Grow Therapy has built its business around insured therapy and psychiatry. Headway works with more than 100 health plans. Rula now covers commercial insurance alongside Medicare, Medicaid and employer programs. Talkiatry has more than 100 insurance partners.
Even the big consumer brands are moving toward institutional distribution. Headspace has pushed deeper into employers and health plans, while Calm Health is now distributed through companies such as UnitedHealthcare and Solera.
The consumer mental health app is still alive. What has changed is where the bigger businesses are being built. Insurance administration used to look like healthcare bureaucracy that startups wanted to bypass. These days, handling that bureaucracy well is one of the clearest competitive advantages in the market.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our mental health market deck, search interest in men’s mental health has been rising steadily
Is Spring Health the top mental health startup right now?
Spring Health has the strongest overall position in the mental health startup market right now.
The freshest numbers make the case stronger than it was even recently. Spring completed its acquisition of Alma this year, and Kinnevik's latest quarterly reporting says the combined business is targeting about $1 billion of revenue over the next 12 months, gross margins in the high 50s and continued EBITDA profitability.
Spring was already large before Alma entered the picture. More than 50 million people had access through employers and health plans, and Kinnevik reported revenue CAGR above 80% over the previous three years. Spring was profitable throughout 2025. That combination of growth and profitability is still unusual among venture-backed healthcare companies.
Alma adds a different piece. Its software handles insurance, billing and practice management for independent mental health clinicians. Spring can therefore reach people through employer benefits and health plans while Alma sits much closer to the providers delivering the care. The acquisition closed after regulatory review, so we can now judge Spring as an operating combination rather than a proposed deal.
The economics look serious enough to separate Spring from many digital-health unicorns. Kinnevik's latest update says the combined company should keep generating positive EBITDA at around a $1 billion revenue run rate. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that the transaction was expected to imply a value of roughly $6 billion to $7 billion for the combined business, although Spring itself did not announce a formal valuation.
Spring still has plenty to prove as it integrates Alma, especially because provider infrastructure and employer mental health benefits are quite different businesses. But among private mental health companies, nobody else currently gives us the same combination of revenue scale, growth, profitability and control over several parts of the care system.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest mental health market report.
Is Grow Therapy growing faster than the other mental health startups?
Grow Therapy has the best verified growth story among the large mental health startups we reviewed.
The Financial Times and Statista ranked Grow first across the entire Americas' Fastest-Growing Companies list this year. Revenue rose from $3.6 million in 2021 to $617.4 million in 2024, a compound annual growth rate of 455.6%. Grow therefore became roughly 170 times larger in revenue in only three years.
That kind of growth can sometimes come from a tiny base and stop being interesting once the company becomes large. Grow has already crossed that stage. More than $600 million of annual revenue puts the company in a very different category from a promising early-stage marketplace.
Investors have repriced the company accordingly. Grow raised $150 million this year at a $3 billion valuation, after having raised an $88 million Series C previously. Its network now includes more than 26,000 therapists and prescribing clinicians, according to Grow's current materials, with appointments available nationwide and an average insured copay of roughly $21.
Grow is also showing where AI can actually improve the economics of mental healthcare. Reuters reported that its documentation technology reduced the time providers spent on clinical notes by nearly 70%. In a business where clinician time is the scarce input, that kind of improvement is much more valuable than adding another generic chatbot.
Spring is still our overall number one because it is broader, profitable and now owns Alma. But if we ranked purely on current commercial acceleration, Grow Therapy would be the company to beat.
This chart, featured in our mental health market deck, illustrates yearly VC investment in mental health startups
Has Headway built the biggest mental health provider network?
Headway currently has the largest clearly disclosed provider network among the major independent insurance-enabled mental health platforms we found.
Headway finished 2025 with more than 65,000 mental health providers after adding over 22,000 during the year. Its clinicians have delivered more than 30 million appointments since the company launched, and the platform works with more than 100 health plans.
The comparison with its closest rivals is useful. Grow Therapy currently advertises more than 26,000 therapists and prescribers. Rula's latest clinical report puts its network above 23,000. Lyra has more than 30,000 providers globally, but Lyra runs a broader employer mental health benefit rather than the same provider-enablement model.
Headway has therefore built an enormous supply advantage in a fairly short period. The company helps therapists with credentialing, insurance contracts, billing and payments, taking work that many clinicians previously had to handle themselves or avoid by staying cash-pay.
Its last major announced financing also showed how quickly the market recognized that position. Headway raised $100 million at a $2.3 billion valuation in 2024, roughly 130% above its valuation from the previous year.
The main gap today is financial transparency. We have excellent current data on providers, health-plan relationships and appointment volume, but much less information on revenue and profitability than we have for Grow or Spring. That keeps Headway behind those two in our overall ranking.
Still, 65,000 providers is hard to dismiss. If insurance-enabled mental healthcare keeps expanding, Headway already controls one of the largest clinician distribution networks in the category.
Is Lyra Health still one of the top mental health startups?
Lyra Health is still firmly in the top tier, although its old $5.58 billion valuation no longer tells us where it ranks today.
Lyra currently serves more than 20 million people through direct employer relationships and has built a global network of more than 30,000 providers. Its partnerships extend its potential reach much further, and Workday recently chose Lyra as its preferred mental health partner for Workday Wellness.
The company has also kept expanding clinically. Lyra bought Bend Health to add pediatric mental healthcare, neuropsychological testing and more intensive youth services. It now covers a much wider range of needs than the employee therapy benefit many people still associate with the company.
Lyra's AI rollout is becoming substantial too. Its conversational mental health guide moved from a limited pilot toward broader availability this year, while AI is also being used for triage, provider matching and administrative work. Lyra says its provider tools can save more than three hours of administrative work per week.
What we lack is a fresh financial marker comparable with Spring's current revenue target or Grow's recent $3 billion financing. Lyra's $5.58 billion valuation came from a $235 million round in 2022, near the peak of the digital-health funding cycle. Treating that price as directly comparable with a financing completed today would distort the ranking.
Lyra remains one of the strongest mental health companies in the market, with real scale and unusually broad clinical capabilities. We simply see stronger evidence of current commercial momentum at Spring, Grow and Headway.
This chart, featured in our mental health market deck, shows why Talkspace is winning in mental health
Is Talkiatry the strongest psychiatry startup?
Talkiatry is currently the clearest leader among startups built specifically around psychiatry.
The company now employs more than 800 psychiatrists and has completed more than three million patient visits. It works with more than 100 insurance partners and says first appointments can usually happen within days.
Owning that psychiatrist workforce gives Talkiatry a different kind of advantage from therapy marketplaces. Psychiatrists remain a scarce clinical resource, and psychiatric care includes diagnosis and medication management that ordinary therapy platforms cannot provide with therapists alone.
The company has also become much better capitalized. Talkiatry raised $210 million in a recent Series D financing package led by Perceptive Advisors, taking total capital raised above $400 million. The Wall Street Journal reported that the new money will support further expansion and technology, including AI in the company's backend operations.
Its latest clinical data are encouraging as well. Talkiatry says 86% of patients in its measurement cohort felt better after two visits, based on standardized depression and anxiety questionnaires. The company's current patient materials also say 65% of patients with anxiety or depression were below the clinically significant symptom threshold after an average of five visits.
The trade-off is pretty clear. A company employing hundreds of psychiatrists carries far more clinical payroll and operating complexity than a software marketplace. Talkiatry has deliberately accepted that burden because it gives the company more control over care.
That makes Talkiatry harder to scale cheaply, but also harder to copy. Among private mental health companies, very few have assembled anything comparable.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest mental health market report.
Is Rula quietly becoming one of the biggest mental health startups?
Rula has become much bigger than its public profile suggests, and we now put it comfortably in the top tier of insurance-enabled mental healthcare companies.
Rula's latest annual clinical report says the platform has facilitated more than 10 million therapy and psychiatry sessions and now works with more than 23,000 providers. Those clinicians treat 92 conditions across 83 therapeutic approaches, while the company works with 124 commercial insurance plans alongside Medicare, Medicaid and employee assistance programs.
Rula also reports more than 112,000 open appointment slots in a typical week and a median wait of roughly one day. Insured sessions cost patients about $15 on average. Those numbers show an actual national care network rather than a directory with thousands of nominally registered therapists.
The clinical dataset has become unusually large as well. In its current report, Rula says 71% of patients entering with moderate-to-severe symptoms reach clinically meaningful improvement within three months, using measures such as PHQ-9 and GAD-7. The analysis draws on millions of sessions, although we still treat company-published comparisons with outside industry benchmarks more cautiously than randomized independent research.
The financing picture is slightly messier. Forge's current private-market data show a small Series C-1 financing this year at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, following a much larger 2024 round at roughly $1.22 billion. Because the recent financing itself was only about $6 million, we give that valuation less weight than Grow Therapy's $150 million round at $3 billion.
Even with that caveat, Rula belongs in the conversation with Headway and Grow. The gap between those companies is now much smaller than their relative name recognition suggests.
This chart, featured in our mental health market deck, illustrates yearly funding for mental health startups
Is Charlie Health winning the high-acuity mental health market?
Charlie Health has built the strongest private position we found in virtual intensive outpatient mental healthcare.
Charlie focuses on patients who need considerably more support than a weekly therapy appointment. Its virtual intensive outpatient programs combine group sessions, individual treatment and family therapy, while its coverage has expanded into substance-use treatment and other higher-acuity needs.
The company grew to 40 states during 2025. Its current site now says its programs are covered by more than 600 insurance plans, up from the 300-plus plans cited in the previous annual outcomes report. That is a useful sign that payer distribution has continued expanding after the underlying clinical-report period ended.
Charlie also has stronger outcome data than many mental health startups publish. Its latest annual report found that average anxiety and depression scores fell 50% between intake and discharge. Self-harm days fell 69% and suicidal ideation fell 70% among the relevant patient groups. Current company data also show that improvements persist a year after treatment, although these remain observational outcomes rather than randomized trial results.
The niche is particularly attractive because the alternative for some patients can involve emergency departments, inpatient treatment or long waiting lists for in-person programs. Virtual IOP lets Charlie deliver many hours of structured treatment without building physical clinics in every market.
Charlie is harder to rank financially because it discloses much less revenue and valuation data than Spring or Grow. Operationally, though, its position is clear. We see fewer serious competitors at comparable scale in virtual high-acuity care than we do in ordinary online therapy.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest mental health market report.
Do Headspace and Calm still belong among the top mental health startups?
Headspace still belongs near the top of the market, while Calm remains important but sits further away from the clinical infrastructure businesses that are growing fastest today.
Headspace has changed considerably from the meditation app most consumers remember. After combining with Ginger, it added coaching, therapy and employer mental health services. The Financial Times recently reported revenue above $200 million and positive EBITDA, with more than 5.8 million people receiving Headspace through workplace benefits.
A Cigna agreement adds potential access for another seven million people. That puts Headspace much closer to an enterprise healthcare company than its original consumer-app model would suggest.
Calm is moving along a similar path from a more consumer-heavy starting point. UnitedHealthcare already made Calm Health available to more than 13 million commercial members, and the newer Solera partnership opened distribution to a network covering more than 16 million people. Calm has also expanded through Optum into Medicare Advantage populations.
The important distinction is clinical depth. Headspace offers coaching and therapy itself, while Calm Health often helps screen, engage and guide people toward care available elsewhere. Spring, Talkiatry, Rula and Charlie Health sit closer to the actual delivery of treatment.
That difference pushes both consumer brands down our ranking. Still, their enormous brand awareness can translate into something many clinical startups struggle to create: people actually opening and using the mental health benefit they have been given. Headspace in particular has shown that a consumer mental health brand can mature into a financially serious healthcare platform.
This chart, featured in our mental health market deck, compares the main business model options for tele-mental health platforms
Is AI creating a new leader in mental health?
AI has yet to produce a new mental health startup that displaces the established leaders; right now, the biggest gains are showing up inside companies that already control clinicians, patients and payer relationships.
The pattern becomes clearer when we compare how several leading platforms are using the technology. Reuters reported that Grow Therapy's AI documentation product cut clinician documentation time by nearly 70%. Rula's latest clinical report says its own AI note-taking tool reduces documentation work by around 63%. Lyra says its AI tools save providers more than three hours of administrative work each week.
Those are remarkably similar use cases appearing independently across three competitors. We think that is more informative than another announcement of an AI therapist. Provider time is expensive and limited, so removing an hour of paperwork can directly increase how much care a network can deliver.
Patient-facing AI is moving forward more carefully. Lyra has expanded its clinically designed conversational guide, while Headspace has built Ebb for lower-acuity support. Both companies keep escalation paths toward human care when needs become more serious.
Funding is certainly pushing the industry in this direction. Rock Health found that AI-enabled digital-health companies captured 54% of U.S. digital-health venture funding in 2025 and raised rounds around 19% larger on average than companies without an AI story.
Mental healthcare still has a bottleneck that software alone has struggled to remove: patients eventually need qualified people, reimbursement and clinical accountability. The companies in front today are using AI to make those systems run faster. So far, that approach looks much stronger than trying to rebuild the whole market around an autonomous therapy bot.
Which mental health startups have the strongest scale numbers right now?
Spring Health, Grow Therapy and Headway currently give us the strongest combination of hard scale indicators, with Lyra, Rula and Talkiatry forming a very credible second group.
We have to be careful when comparing the numbers because “covered lives,” revenue, provider count and completed visits measure different things. A person who can access Spring through an employer is different from a patient who actually completed a Rula session, and a provider registered with Headway does not generate the same economics as a psychiatrist employed by Talkiatry.
Still, putting the freshest available numbers next to one another makes the market hierarchy much easier to see.
| Company | Freshest useful scale evidence | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Spring Health + Alma | Around $1B next-12-month revenue target, >50M Spring covered lives, profitable | Broadest current operating platform |
| Grow Therapy | $617.4M 2024 revenue, 455.6% three-year CAGR, 26K+ clinicians | Strongest verified growth |
| Headway | 65K+ providers, 30M+ appointments, 100+ health plans | Largest disclosed provider infrastructure network |
| Lyra Health | 20M+ direct members, 30K+ global providers | Very large workforce mental health incumbent |
| Rula | 23K+ providers, 10M+ sessions, 124 commercial plans | Much larger clinical network than its visibility suggests |
| Talkiatry | 800+ employed psychiatrists, 3M+ visits, 100+ insurance partners | Strongest psychiatry-specific platform |
| Headspace | >$200M revenue, EBITDA profitable, 5.8M workplace users | Consumer brand that has become a serious enterprise platform |
| Charlie Health | 40-state footprint, 600+ insurance plans | Leading specialized virtual IOP platform |
This chart, featured in our mental health market deck, shows how market revenue is split across customer segments in the mental health market
So, what are the top mental health startups today?
Spring Health is our number-one mental health startup today, followed by Grow Therapy and Headway. Lyra Health, Talkiatry and Rula complete the strongest top tier, with Headspace, Charlie Health, Calm and Brightside Health behind them.
Spring takes first place because its recent Alma acquisition gives it something none of the others currently match: a large employer and health-plan business connected with provider-side insurance and practice infrastructure, while the combined operation is still growing and profitable.
Grow Therapy is second because its recent revenue growth is extraordinary even after the company reached meaningful scale. Headway takes third because controlling such a large provider network gives it enormous leverage if insurance-funded outpatient mental healthcare keeps growing.
Lyra stays fourth. The company remains extremely large, clinically broad and deeply embedded with employers, although the evidence we have on its current financial trajectory is less complete. Talkiatry comes next because a national workforce of employed psychiatrists is a scarce asset that should remain difficult to reproduce. Rula is very close behind and may be the company most likely to move upward if fresh financial disclosures confirm what its operating scale already suggests.
Headspace ranks above Charlie Health because it combines substantial revenue, profitability, consumer recognition and enterprise distribution. Charlie has a narrower business, but we like the position: virtual high-acuity care is harder to provide and less crowded than generic online therapy. Calm still owns exceptional consumer distribution, although its clinical footprint remains lighter than the companies above it.
Brightside Health rounds out our top ten. It provides therapy and psychiatry, accepts major commercial insurers and has expanded into Medicare and Medicaid, including nationwide Original Medicare Part B coverage. We keep it below the larger platforms because public operating-scale data are much thinner.
The pattern behind the ranking is now quite clear. The companies pulling ahead are becoming part of the healthcare system itself. They bring clinicians into insurance networks, negotiate with payers, sell through employers, handle claims, measure outcomes and increasingly use AI to reduce the administrative work around each appointment.
That is why our current ranking looks very different from a list of the mental health apps with the most downloads or the startups that reached the highest valuations during the pandemic boom.
| Rank | Mental health startup | Why it ranks here today |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spring Health | Best overall mix of scale, growth, profitability and healthcare infrastructure |
| 2 | Grow Therapy | Strongest verified commercial growth |
| 3 | Headway | Most powerful independent provider-network position |
| 4 | Lyra Health | Huge employer footprint and broad clinical platform |
| 5 | Talkiatry | Clear leader in scaled virtual psychiatry |
| 6 | Rula | Rapidly emerging insurance-based care giant |
| 7 | Headspace | Profitable platform with strong consumer and enterprise distribution |
| 8 | Charlie Health | Best position in virtual high-acuity outpatient care |
| 9 | Calm | Massive consumer reach increasingly converted into payer distribution |
| 10 | Brightside Health | Strong clinical and insurance model, with less disclosed scale |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest mental health market report.
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis answers the question “What are the top startups in the mental health market?” by focusing on current operating power rather than relying on historical reputation or old unicorn valuations. We compare commercial scale, growth, financial strength, provider and patient reach, payer distribution, clinical depth and strategic position in the mental healthcare system.
For each dimension, we looked for the freshest meaningful evidence available. Recent revenue, profitability, financing events, provider-network growth, payer relationships, appointment volume and care delivery carried more weight than older valuations when the newer evidence gave us a clearer view of where a company stands today.
We did not force every company into the same metric. A provider-enablement platform such as Headway, an employer mental health platform such as Spring Health, an employed psychiatry group such as Talkiatry and a virtual intensive outpatient provider such as Charlie Health create value in different ways, so each scale number was read in the context of the business model behind it.
We also separated demonstrated operating strength from forward-looking claims. Completed visits, current revenue, active provider networks, existing payer distribution and realized profitability carried more weight than targets, potential covered lives or valuation figures that were not tied to a substantial recent financing.
The final ranking was formed by looking for convergence across several current indicators rather than applying a mechanical score. That is why Spring Health can rank above a company with a larger historical valuation, and why Grow Therapy's recent revenue trajectory or Headway's provider network can matter more than brand recognition alone.
We prioritized sources that added specific, checkable information and used investor reporting or independent financial reporting when it was available. Key sources include Kinnevik on Spring Health's financial performance, Spring Health on completion of the Alma acquisition, the Financial Times on Grow Therapy's 2021-2024 revenue growth, Headway's 2025 company report, Lyra Health's current network disclosures, Talkiatry's current operating scale, Rula's annual clinical report, Charlie Health's annual outcomes report, Calm Health's UnitedHealthcare distribution announcement, Teladoc Health's latest BetterHelp financial results, and Rock Health's 2025 digital-health funding analysis.
This chart, featured in our mental health market deck, shows how therapy matchmaking platform technology has evolved over time
