I grew up in a house where mental health was a constant topic of conversation. My mother, a therapist, and my father, a psychiatrist, emphasized its importance, and its inextricable link with physical health. Years later, I started Headway, a company dedicated to making therapy more affordable for those who needed it.
I left Headway after 5 years to become a teacher, and landed at a low-income charter school in Brooklyn. I stepped into a classroom full of teenagers already fluent in the new vocabulary of harm: cyberbullying, the fluid and contested edges of gender and identity, addiction to phones and social media, dependence on vapes. Our sole school counselor’s office was full. Always full. She had no clinical training, and yet she assumed responsibility for the mental health of hundreds of kids. She did the best she could, counseling a small fraction of the students who needed it, and sent the rest out for care—to community clinics, to sit on monthslong waitlists that only seemed to get longer.
I knew there were therapists who would have wanted to help, and who could have. But doing so required accepting Medicaid, which covers nearly half of American children and all of the students in my class. And Medicaid is hard and slow, much too difficult for private practice therapists to navigate on their own, and too demanding of time they don’t have. So the kids most in need of care are the ones who sat waiting.
The Context
Kids live within a unique care structure. Unlike adults, they are observed and “managed” by a constellation of others—parents, teachers, school counselors, therapists.
It’s hardly a secret that these parties rarely coordinate. They each hold pieces of the picture – a mother knows what her son is struggling with at home, a school counselor understands his triggers at school, and so on—but they rarely collaborate, and for a simple reason: It’s too hard. There is no product, service, or system designed to recognize that the governance of youth mental health is fundamentally multi-party, and that care should be designed first and foremost for collaboration.
Until that changes, kids, particularly our most vulnerable, will remain underserved. Therapists don’t have the tools to accept Medicaid, nor the infrastructure to collaborate with schools and parents. They’ll stay outside of insurance networks, and out of reach for families who need them most. And the fallout of unmanaged mental health issues will accelerate: declining classroom engagement, poor academic performance, absenteeism, eroded self-image, and unacceptably high levels of suicidality among our youngest generation.
Introducing Marble
Marble is building what’s missing in youth mental health: the connective tissue. We’re not another point solution or single-use app. We’re the infrastructure layer—a platform designed from the ground up for kids and teens, where care collaboration isn’t an afterthought. It’s in the product’s DNA.
Why? Because we know the wraparound approach works. Clinically, it’s proven to be the most effective way to support kids. Practically, it’s the only way to align parents, teachers, school counselors, and therapists into a shared view of care.
Since launching in New York last year, Marble has taken off: In 10 months, hundreds of schools began using Marble, first tentatively - wary of a promise of no waitlists and affordable care that seemed to be too good to be true – and then extensively, referring dozens of students each month. To date, Marble has facilitated over 15,000 therapy sessions for over 1,000 families, most of whom would still be languishing on waitlists, desperate for support that is always just out of reach.
I’m proud to announce that behind this traction, Marble has raised $15.5M in Series A capital. The round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from existing investors Town Hall Ventures and Khosla Ventures. This round, raised less than a year and half after our seed, further validates our vision of building a new system for youth mental health that finally includes all American families, not just those with commercial insurance or the means to pay out of pocket.
What’s Next
The youth mental health crisis is largely understood as an access problem today, and for good reason. Millions of kids need support, and the infrastructure that could connect them to a broad supply of qualified therapists who want to help simply isn’t there. Marble’s next chapter focuses on scaling our infrastructure nationwide.
As we do, and conduct hundreds of thousands of therapy appointments, we accumulate a data advantage that powers our next chapter: Improving the product of therapy.
Therapy is better than sitting on a waitlist, but it’s not without flaws. Therapists often apply a one-size-fits-all approach, and lack the time or economic incentive to gather critical insights from parents or school counselors that can elevate the impact of their care. Sessions are also infrequent, leaving long gaps where kids struggle on their own. Marble is uniquely positioned to change this. By combining the volume of appointments we facilitate with the real-world signals we gather from schools and parents, we can build a data model that makes care more precise, personalized, and effective. And that same model can power companion experiences that bridge the space between sessions, bringing therapy out of the once-a-week cadence and into the daily lives of kids who need it most.
At the heart of all of this, though, isn’t data advantages or connective tissue. It’s kids who live on the margins of our mental health system. The most important measure of our work is whether it changes the trajectory of a child’s life. One parent put it plainly:
“I tried literally everything I could to help my son, but I couldn’t make it happen. I searched far and wide for a therapist that accepted his Medicaid plan, but found none. The school couldn’t help me either, and my son just got worse and worse. He eventually stopped speaking to me entirely, and I grew more and more concerned about his well being.”
It’s for parents like her, and kids like her son, that we’re building Marble’s next chapter.
