Brightside Health

Brightside Health

Brightside Health was founded in November 2017 in San Francisco by CEO Brad Kittredge, Chief Medical Officer Mimi Winsberg, MD, and Principal AI Engineer Jeremy Barth. Kittredge and Barth each cite a family member’s depression as the founding impulse; Winsberg brought a clinical career spent treating difficult-to-resolve cases. The firm built a virtual care delivery model designed to surpass traditional in-person treatment — and by December 2022, it had added a suicide-prevention program grounded in the 30-year Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) framework. The firm deploys its venture funding across several integrated care product lines: personalized psychiatry that analyzes over 100 patient data points to guide prescribing, clinically proven therapy grounded in the evidence-based Unified Protocol, and a first-of-its-kind teen care program for ages 13 and up. Brightside contracts directly with health plans and systems; its payer partnerships, which began with Cigna and Aetna in June 2021, expanded to UnitedHealthcare in June 2022 and to Medicare and Medicaid in October 2023. The firm now covers more than 100 million lives and accepts most major insurance, positioning itself squarely on the access-and-reimbursement axis of digital health rather than a self-pay model. Brightside disclosed $67 million in total venture funding by November 2021, with a $17 million Series A led by ACME (February 2021) and a $50 million Series B (November 2021). The board includes a general partner at Bullpen Capital, the former CEO of Welltok and TriZetto, and the CEO of Redox and former CEO of Optum Behavioral and AbleTo. In October 2023, the firm announced its Medicare and Medicaid partnerships, expanding covered lives past the 100-million threshold (per firm website). The firm’s structure departs from a standard telehealth company: its executive bench pairs a data and AI engineering founder with a practicing psychiatrist and a business-operations CEO, producing a treatment engine built around a proprietary symptom-tracking analytics stack. Brightside couples that clinical-data feedback loop with an insurance-first reimbursement architecture, tying outcomes measurement directly to the payer relationships that fund its growth.