InStride Health, a provider of specialty mental healthcare to children, teens and young adults, landed $30 million in series C funding to fuel its growth as it expands to new markets and broadens its network of payer partners.
Echo Health Ventures and FMZ Ventures led the series C round as new strategic investors. Existing investors also backed the round, including Valtruis, .406 Ventures, General Catalyst and Mass General Brigham Ventures, among others.
The funding news 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 $86 million total to date.
InStride Health, founded in 2021, provides insurance-based virtual specialty treatment for children, teens and young adults with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). InStride integrates clinical expertise, exposure coaching and support into daily life to engage kids and teens and their families, according to the company.
The company was co-founded by Harvard-trained clinicians from McLean Hospital and healthcare and technology leaders to address a growing mental health crisis among kids and teens.
Mona Potter, M.D., and Kathryn Boger, Ph.D., co-developed the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP) at McLean Hospital, a Massachusetts-based psychiatric hospital. Potter and Boger decided to take a model that worked well in an academic hospital and offer expanded, flexible access to mental health treatment—covered by insurance—the clinical leaders told Fierce Healthcare back in 2024. They teamed up with John Voith, a healthcare entrepreneur, to build InStride Health. Voith spent nearly seven years at athenahealth leading interoperability initiatives and then co-founded Virtudent, a teledentistry company.
The pediatric mental health model at McLean produced strong outcomes, but a lack of insurance coverage and a long waitlist made it inaccessible to many families.
"They had built that program and really brought evidence-based practice to that program, and the patients in that program were having just tremendous results. The unfortunate part was that the program was limited to 10 or 15 patients at a time, and it was a self-pay program," Voith, InStride Health's CEO, told Fierce Healthcare. "For us, we aligned around, 'Wow, in a program that's producing such incredible clinical outcomes for families and patients, how do we provide more access to this and scale that kind of quality around the country?' For me, it's always been about where the head and the heart come together, and it's really a big mission that's fueled the whole journey of InStride Health."
The company continues to expand its reach with a clinically driven, technology-enabled approach to care. InStride Health offers evidence-based treatment for complex anxiety, OCD and related disorders for individuals aged seven to 24.
Each patient is paired with a dedicated care team comprised of a psychiatrist, a therapist and an exposure coach to provide real-time support using everyday tools like text and a video- and chat-enabled mobile application. The care team guides patients through personalized programs with clear milestones and real-world exposures to build sustainable skills and habits for ongoing progress.
The care team can also coordinate with the individual's support network outside of sessions: parents, family members, school staff and existing providers.
"The goal of our program is to not just to stabilize the child and the family, but to provide skills so that the child and family can get into a remission, and so that they can actually graduate from the program and not be a 'forever patient' and return to the important parts of their lives that were being held back by the condition," Voith said.
InStride Health's services are available in 17 states, primarily on the East Coast and Texas, and that's up from just 8 states in 2024. The company has treated 5,000 patients, Voith said.
The fresh funding will support the company's ambitions to "triple down" in key growth markets—including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Texas—expand into additional markets to fill in gaps along the East Coast and grow its footprint in the Midwest and West, Voith said. The company aims to kick off that expansion in the next 12 months.
Expanding access to mental healthcare while maintaining high clinical quality is a key mission for InStride Health, he noted. In 2025, the company's care team grew by 90% and it doubled the number of patients treated while clinical outcomes remained consistent, according to InStride Health's third annual outcomes report.
The company published clinical data indicating that 97% of pediatric patients with anxiety or OCD showed clinical improvement. That analysis, based on 3,604 episodes of care from 2023 to 2025, indicated a 53% average reduction in anxiety scores, with 81% of caregivers reporting lower distress and less than 1% of patients requiring hospitalization within 12 months of treatment. Two-thirds of patients (66%) are referred to the program through their health plan or a provider, and 98% of caregivers would recommend InStride Health's services to a friend, the report found.
Most patients (99%) used health plan coverage for InStride's services and the average wait time to see a clinician was less than three days, according to the report.
Working with payers to offer 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 barrier that we saw when we founded the company," Voith said.
With the series C funding round, InStride Health brought in two new strategic partners to help fuel the company's next chapter of high-quality growth, he noted.
Echo Health Ventures serves as the strategic corporate venture capital arm for a collaborative network of Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans. FMZ Ventures is a growth equity firm that invests in the experience economy and digitally-enabled consumer marketplace companies.
"FMZ saw how important the family experience is to us. Families show up in a moment of crisis," Voith said. InStride Health builds personalized care plans around the individual and family to help to stabilize patients, teach new skills and guide real-world practice to enable lasting change.
"FMZ is a great partner in that they really understand the importance of that experience as part of the quality story as we move forward," Voith said.
In 2026, InStride Health has strong momentum as it treats more patients and demonstrates strong return on investment for payer partners, he noted.
"We have demonstrated replicability of our model in other markets on the East Coast, and so with that momentum, we had a number of investors interested in the company and the round. We were really fortunate to hand-pick Echo and FMZ because we believe in the strategic value they add to allow us to get to the next milestones we have for ourselves," he said.
The funding round also reflects investor confidence in InStride's model, which combines specialty pediatric mental health expertise with technology and AI infrastructure that has been built into the company's operations since launch.
"We think about clinical excellence and domain-specific AI together, and that really being the sweet spot for us. The domain-specific AI supports the clinical excellence. We spun out of the number one psychiatric hospital in the country, at founding, and we have an amazing, highly-skilled care team. When we use AI, we're really looking to not just use generic AI, but to find ways to support that clinical excellence through workflow tools and clinical decision support tools," Voith said. "At the end of the day, we want to keep our care team doing the diagnosis, doing the care plan, having that direct relationship with the patient and family, and so AI is really in a supporting role in that way."