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Spring Health, a global mental health company built on one AI-native platform, was the subject of a TIME100 Next profile by senior correspondent Alice Park, published in September 2025. The feature traces April Koh's path from her earliest experiences with mental health stigma — growing up Korean American in an Evangelical household — to co-founding Spring Health at Yale in 2016 after encountering Adam Chekroud's machine learning research in psychiatry. Koh recognized in Chekroud's data-driven approach a way to cut through the trial-and-error process that had defined her own search for care: matching people to the right treatment from the beginning, rather than cycling through options for months or years.
The profile documents the pivots that shaped Spring Health into one of the highest-growth companies in behavioral health. Early attempts to pitch AI-based care matching to employers fell flat — "I did so many sales pitches where people were on their phones or falling asleep," Koh told TIME — and the company shifted its framing toward the productivity and outcomes-based case for mental health benefits. That decision, combined with two major studies documenting both clinical improvement and financial savings for employers, eventually broke through. The article also covers how Koh built a culture of deliberate investment in employee wellbeing at Spring Health itself, including focus weeks, a coaching program, and leading by example on mental health practices — earning the company a Great Place to Work certification earlier in 2025.
"No one was thinking about using AI to match people to the right care for them. We embedded these advanced algorithms in our product from the early days," Koh told TIME. "And that technology is ultimately what makes our mental health care services the best in the industry."
Read the full TIME100 Next profile at TIME.com
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