Korean-American April Koh, at just 30 years of age, is the driving force behind New York-based Spring Health, a start-up worth more than US$1 billion that offers employers better mental health options for their workers.
Spring Health attracted $300 million in investments since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, and reached $1 billion in estimated value in September last year, becoming a so-called unicorn just five years after it was launched.
Born in 1991 in Korea, Koh moved to the U.S. with her family when she was four, and started her own company in 2016. Two years later she was among Forbes magazine's top 30 entrepreneurs under 30 and in 2019 Goldman Sachs' 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs.
Last year, when she was 29, Koh became the youngest female CEO of a unicorn.
She decided to start a business offering mental healthcare when she saw her roommate at Yale suffer from an eating disorder. Her friend took eight different anti-depressants until she found one that suited her and had to wait up to three weeks to get a doctor's appointment.
Koh, who majored in sociology and computer science, found the inspiration for her start-up in a report about artificial intelligence running machines to find the best remedy for a patient. The report was written by Yale Medical School doctoral candidate Adam Chekroud, and she sought him out.
"Current forms of mental health treatment are like paper maps that offer routes to treatment," she said. But Spring Health is a GPS pointing to the "fastest way" by considering real-time traffic conditions.
Her 150 client companies include Pfizer, truck delivery company JB Hunt, supermarket chain Whole Foods and food company General Mills, and 2 million people use her services. Koh said sales and the number of clients surged six-fold last year during the pandemic.
She credits lots of training and resilience as her strengths. "It's not easy for a young, female CEO to attract investments, but my limitations prompted me to work harder." She added that she hopes more young Korean women would open start-ups since they don't have to be focused on their marriage and family at that age.
According to Fortune, the U.S. market for mental health services is expected to grow from $68.8 billion in 2020 to $99.4 billion in 2028. Spring Health plans to go public in the coming years. "I dream of my company growing into one that saves the lives of millions of people and survives 100 years," Koh said.
