A Million Visits a Month: Jake Cooper on Building Grow Therapy Into a Billion-Dollar Mental-Health Platform
Key takeaways from Village Global interview with Grow Therapy co-founder and CEO Jake CooperDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (August 2026):
Scale and profitability. Grow Therapy now runs around one million visits a month across 26,000 providers, passed $1bn in top-line revenue at the end of last year, and has been operating profitably every year since year two.
Founded in COVID for three stakeholders. Cooper started Grow with co-founders Manoj Kanagaraj and Alan Ni after finding mental health broken for patients, providers and payers — an industry that was both fully analog and heavily fragmented.
An end-to-end system. The company built a single platform spanning marketplace, EHR, scheduling and revenue-cycle management — four businesses under one roof — arguing the integration creates a '1 plus 1 equals 3' advantage that has spawned many copycats.
COVID unlocked the model. The shift from in-person to virtual let providers practise without office space and made patient-provider matching state-wide rather than hyper-local — roughly 500 options instead of five.
A personal mission. Cooper cites his own struggle to find a therapist and the loss of his sister to severe mental-health challenges as the catalysts, framing delivery as a responsibility over people's lives.
Hiring by 'double-clicking'. With around 620 employees, Cooper says he probes candidates from strategic conception down to tactical execution — six layers deep — to find high-agency operators, citing DoorDash's Tony Xu as a model.
AI that grows distribution, not just cost. Cooper argues AI investments that improve distribution and experience beat pure cost-cutting, pointing to matching and an AI coaching tool patients use between sessions as 'interactive journaling'.
Therapists aren't going away. Despite 40% of Grow's patients using an LLM for health and relationship advice, industry therapy visits rose ~7% year-on-year in 2025 — Cooper is emphatic that human therapists keep their jobs.
Read more: Village Global · Grow Therapy
