InStride Health, which provides specialized mental health care to children, teens, and young adults, has secured $30 million in Series C funding to fuel growth as it expands into new markets and expands its network of payment partners.
Echo Health Ventures and FMZ Ventures led the Series C round as new strategic investors. Existing investors including .406 Ventures, General Catalyst, and Mass General Brigham Ventures also supported the round.
News of this funding was shared exclusively with Fierce Healthcare.
The company raised $30 million in Series B funding in March 2024 and $26 million in 2022. InStride has raised a total of $86 million to date.
Founded in 2021, InStride Health provides insurance-based virtual specialty care for children, teens, and young adults with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The company says InStride engages children, teens and their families by integrating clinical expertise, exposure coaching and support into their daily lives.
The company was co-founded by Harvard-trained McLean Hospital clinicians and healthcare and technology leaders to address the growing mental health crisis among children and teens.
Mona Potter, MD, and Kathryn Borger, PhD, co-developed the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP) at McLean Hospital, a Massachusetts-based psychiatric hospital. Potter and Borger decided to take a model that had worked well at University Hospitals and provide expanded and flexible access to insurance-covered mental health treatment, clinical leaders told Fierce Healthcare in 2024.They teamed up with healthcare entrepreneur John Foyt to create Instride Health. Voith led interoperability efforts at athenahealth for nearly seven years and later co-founded teledentistry company Virtudent.
Co-founders Dr. Mona Potter (Chief Medical Officer), John Voigt, CEO, and Dr. Kathryn Borger (Chief Clinical Officer).
(Left to right) Mona Potter, MD, Chief Medical Officer, John Voigt, Chief Executive Officer, and Kathryn Borger, MD, Chief Clinical Officer. (Instride Health)
Although McLean’s pediatric mental health model has produced excellent outcomes, lack of insurance coverage and long waiting lists have made it inaccessible to many families.
“They built that program, they really put evidence-based practices into that program, and the patients who participated in that program had just amazing results. What was disappointing was that the program was limited to 10 or 15 patients at a time, and it was a self-pay program,” InStride Health CEO Foyt told Fierce Healthcare. “We all agreed on, ‘How do we increase access to a program that is producing such great clinical outcomes for families and patients and how do we scale that kind of quality across the country?'” For me, that’s always been a place where my head and my heart have come together, and that’s really been the big mission and the driving force behind the whole journey of InStride Health. ”
The company continues to expand its reach with a clinically-driven, technology-enabled approach to care. InStride Health provides evidence-based treatments for complex anxiety, OCD, and related disorders for individuals ages 7 to 24.
Each patient is paired with a dedicated care team of psychiatrists, therapists, and exposure coaches who provide real-time support using everyday tools such as text, video, and chat-enabled mobile applications. Care teams coach patients through a personalized program with clear milestones and real-world exposure to build sustainable skills and habits for continued progress.
The care team can also coordinate with personal support networks such as parents, family members, school staff, and existing health care providers outside of sessions.
“The goal of our program is to not only stabilize children and families, but to provide them with the skills to be able to go into remission and actually return to the important parts of their lives that have been held back by this condition without leaving the program and becoming ‘forever patients,'” Voigt said.
InStride Health’s services are available in 17 states, primarily on the East Coast and Texas, up from just eight states in 2024. The company has treated 5,000 patients, Voigt said.
The new funding will support the company’s ambitions to “triple” in key growth markets such as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Texas, expand into additional markets to fill gaps along the East Coast and expand its footprint in the Midwest and West, Foyt said. The company aims to begin its expansion within the next 12 months.
Expanding access to mental health care while maintaining high clinical quality is an important mission of InStride Health, he said. InStride Health’s third annual performance report shows that in 2025, the company’s treatment teams grew by 90%, treated twice the number of patients, and clinical outcomes remained consistent.
The company announced clinical data showing that 97% of pediatric patients with anxiety or OCD showed clinical improvement. The analysis, based on 3,604 episodes of care from 2023 to 2025, showed that anxiety scores decreased by an average of 53%, 81% of caregivers reported less distress, and less than 1% of patients required hospitalization within 12 months of treatment. According to the report, two-thirds (66%) of patients were referred to the program through their health plan or provider, and 98% of caregivers would recommend InStride Health’s services to a friend.
Most patients (99%) had medical insurance for Instride’s services, and the average wait time to see a doctor was less than three days, according to the report.
Working with payers to provide insurance-based services is a key differentiator for InStride Health, and the company is in network with most major commercial insurers, including Aetna, Anthem, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, and Oscar.
“Being insurance-based is a big part of addressing the access barriers we saw when we started the company,” Voigt said.
With the Series C funding round, InStride Health has brought on two new strategic partners to fuel the company’s next chapter of high-quality growth, he said.
Echo Health Ventures serves as the strategic corporate venture capital arm of the collaborative network of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans. FMZ Ventures is a growth equity firm that invests in experience economy and digitally enabled consumer market companies.
“FMZ realized how important family experiences are to us. Families show up in moments of crisis,” Voigt said. InStride Health builds personalized care plans around individuals and families, stabilizing patients, teaching new skills, and coaching real-world practices that enable lasting change.
“FMZ is a great partner in that they really understand the importance of experience as part of the quality story as we move forward,” Voigt said.
He noted that InStride Health has strong momentum to treat more patients and demonstrate a high return on investment for payer partners in 2026.
“We have demonstrated the reproducibility of our model in other markets on the East Coast, and that momentum led to many investors interested in the company and this round. We were truly fortunate to be able to self-select Echo and FMZ because we believe in the strategic value they add to reach our own next milestones,” he said.
This funding round also reflects investors’ confidence in InStride’s model, which combines pediatric mental health expertise with the technology and AI infrastructure that has been embedded in the company’s operations since its launch.
“We think of clinical excellence and domain-specific AI together, and that’s really the sweet spot for us. Domain-specific AI supports clinical excellence. We were spun out of the number one psychiatric hospital in the country when we were founded, and we have an amazing, highly skilled care team. When we use AI, we don’t just use general-purpose AI; We’re really looking at finding ways to support that clinical excellence through tools and clinical decision support tools,” Voith said. “At the end of the day, we want care teams to make diagnoses, create care plans, and maintain a direct relationship with patients and families, so AI has a really supportive role in that.”
