Analog and fragmented: the two problems Jake Cooper diagnosed before building Grow Therapy

Key takeaways from the Village Global interview with Grow Therapy CEO and co-founder Jake CooperDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (August 2026):

Founded during COVID for three stakeholders. Cooper started Grow Therapy in the middle of the pandemic after seeing that mental health wasn't working for the three parties that make up the industry — patients, providers and payers.

Lived it from both sides. As a patient, Cooper struggled to find a mental-health provider who took his insurance, let alone was a good fit; his co-founder Manoj, training as a doctor looking at psychiatry, saw the operational friction of running a private practice from the provider side.

Problem one: the industry was totally analog. Core workflows still ran on manual, offline processes rather than modern software.

Problem two: it was extremely fragmented. Fragmentation ran through both the participants — primary-care doctors, therapists and psychiatrists all diagnosing separately — and the software, with separate directories for leads, a different EHR, a different scheduling system and often an independent biller.

The thesis: an end-to-end system. Cooper reasoned that building a single platform supporting every stakeholder could advance what he calls the most important mission in the world — helping people live happier, healthier, more content lives.

Provider-first go-to-market. By collapsing directories, scheduling, records and billing into one place, Grow Therapy set out to remove the operational burden that keeps therapists from taking insurance and seeing more patients.

Read more: Village Global