It’s World Mental Health Day, which means our feeds are full of reminders to breathe, take a walk, or check in on friends. But behind the hashtags and motivational messaging, many face a much harder truth: that is for millions of families, access to care isn’t about motivation or intentionality; its about accessibility.
A new generation of founders is working to change that. All part of the Headstream Accelerator, these women are using lived experience to rebuild mental health tech from the ground up.
From grief kits in schools to Medicaid-covered foster care therapy, these women are proving that compassion can scale. These are everyday women, turning chaos into companies, reminding us that innovation doesn’t always start in Silicon Valley.
“If we fail kids here, society pays for it.” Reimagining Foster Care Mental Health
Michelle Turner’s founder journey began not in a boardroom, but in her Georgia living room. Over five years, Turner and her husband had fostered more than 40 children, four of whom they later adopted. She shares that throughout that time, what she witnessed was heartbreaking: “When you’ve fostered more than forty children, and adopted four, you see the system from every angle. I worked inside healthcare by day and as a foster parent by night, and still I couldn’t get kids the mental health care they needed until they were in crisis. That’s when I realized: we weren’t missing compassion, we were missing infrastructure.”
For Turner, the personal became statistical, and those statistics are staggering. “Kids in foster care are just 3% of the Medicaid population, but they account for about 30% of behavioral health spend,” Turner says. “Yet three out of four don’t have access to quality therapy.”
Her company, Hear Now Health, is the first virtual healthcare platform designed for children and families in the foster system, using AI to help streamline a fractured process. For Turner, this is a clear example of what “AI for good” can look like: tech that fixes what bureaucracy broke. “We’re using AI to fill in the missing pieces, not replace people. Kids in foster care often arrive with two birthdays or three last names. Our system uses AI to piece together fragmented data so we can get them care faster.
For Turner, social impact isn’t just about empathy but economics. “It’s mission-driven, yes. But it also makes economic sense. If we fail kids here, society pays for it across housing, education, and healthcare. You might hear ‘foster care’ and think charity. But this is a highly regulated, legally mandated population with guaranteed coverage. That creates one of the most stable and impactful markets in healthcare. We’re showing that you can build something that’s both mission-driven and financially sound.”
“Nurse practitioners are the backbone of community care.” Empowering Mental Health Providers
Taylor Rose, co-founder of Kinstead Health, took a different path into the space. She worked for years as a hospital administrator at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and later as a McKinsey healthcare consultant. But throughout her career, she saw a pattern: people trusted community-based providers more than large health systems, but many of those small practices were struggling to survive. “Our healthcare system is brilliant at saving lives in crisis, and terrible at preventing them. For most families, finding consistent, personal care has become a maze of waitlists and insurance approvals.
Kinstead helps nurse practitioners (NPs) launch independent practices, giving them the agency to take control of their own livelihoods and address America’s looming provider shortage, with an expected deficit in the region of 40,000 primary care professionals within the next decade. “Nurse practitioners are growing by 45% per year,” Taylor notes. “They’re the backbone of community care, but the system makes it nearly impossible for them to go out on their own. We’ve built a healthcare system where the biggest players hold all the cards, aka insurers, hospitals, regulators, and most importantly, patients are left feeling like line items instead of human beings.”
Kinstead’s bet is simple. It aims to free clinicians from paperwork, allowing them to focus on their patients and boosts their earning power. “We joke that ChatGPT is our third co-founder,” Rose says. “But really, AI lets us cut through the noise so clinicians can spend their time where it matters, with patients.”
“I had to hide my grief for years.” Healing Childhood Mental Health Through Creativity
For Kristina Jones, founder of Guardian Lane, her founder story is deeply personal. She was seven years old when her father died of cancer. “The only help I got was a Christmas tree from school and one therapy session in a room that smelled like burnt popcorn. I had to hide my grief for years. That silence shaped me,” she says.
Decades later, after selling her first tech company, Jones couldn’t shake the memory. In 2020, she launched Guardian Lane, a digital platform connecting therapists to grieving children through creative, therapeutic videos. With more than 60 sessions now available, from art therapy to music and movement, the platform reaches 3,000 schools and two million students. “We expect kids to just bounce back, but when grief isn’t addressed, it doesn’t disappear. It compounds. It shows up later as anxiety, addiction, or depression. I wanted to build something that could catch that early. I wanted to build the help I needed as a little girl. So I did,” she says.
Her next goal is what she coined “an emergency grief kit” for schools, so administrators can instantly deliver resources when tragedy strikes. “One in five kids loses a close loved one,” she says. “One in four young people who die by suicide is bereaved. Death and grief are universal, but they’re still taboo. We’re changing that.”
“They didn’t even realize they could invest.” Funding the Future of Mental Health Innovation
For Turner, Taylor, and Jones, fundraising has been its own kind of therapy session, filled with education, rejection, and moments of raw revelation.
Turner spends much of her time convincing investors that Medicaid-covered foster care is a market opportunity, not a charity case. Jones found that only people who had personally lost someone were willing to write checks. Taylor discovered a gender gap on her cap table. “Half of our investors are women, and for 75 percent of them, Kinstead was their first angel check,” she shares. “They didn’t even realize they could invest.”
Why It Matters. Women Rebuilding Mental Health from the Ground Up
These women aren’t just building startups, they’re rebuilding trust in a system that lost it long ago. Their message to investors is simple: care and commerce can align. And on a day dedicated to mental-health awareness, they remind us that behind every statistic, 30 percent of behavioral-health spend, 40,000 provider shortages, one in five children grieving, is someone’s story.
For these founders, those stories are the spark that keeps them building.