Birches Health just secured a $20 million combined Seed and Series A, with AlleyCorp leading the A and General Catalyst powering the Seed. Add in Will Ventures, defy.vc, Haystack, and Operator Partners, and you’ve got a serious backing lineup for a company that didn’t even exist before 2023. In less than two years, Birches Health has built the largest clinician network in the U.S. specializing in behavioral addictions. Not substance. Not generic mental health. We’re talking gambling, gaming, sex, pornography, and the black hole of internet compulsion. The addictions born of screens and scaled by algorithms.
Elliott Rapaport, Founder and CEO, saw the reality most ignored. Access to treatment was fragmented, insurance was a labyrinth, and stigma kept people underground. Alongside board member Dr. Martin Rosenzweig, ex-Chief Medical Officer for Behavioral Health at Optum, Rapaport designed a model where treatment doesn’t require showing up at a clinic with a neon sign over your head. It’s virtual, covered by insurance, and delivered by specialists who understand the terrain because they’ve walked it. Thousands of patients across all 50 states have already tapped into this network for therapy, family and couples sessions, group work, and resilience programming led by lived-experience guides.
The demand is overwhelming. 28% of U.S. adults gamble online daily. Sports betting events are topping a billion dollars in wagers. But until Birches Health, finding a clinician who knew more about gambling addiction than the average bookie was nearly impossible. Now patients can access HIPAA-compliant teletherapy with a click, through in-network partnerships with UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates. State Departments of Health are onboard. Delaware North’s Betly platforms have partnered to embed responsible gaming resources. It’s no longer just treatment. It’s infrastructure for a healthier digital future.
Behind the curtain is a tech stack that actually matters. Secure video sessions. Acuity-matching algorithms that tailor care intensity. Automated insurance verification. Progress tracking that adapts treatment instead of handing out cookie-cutter playbooks. Add cloud scalability, outcome analytics, and upcoming self-guided recovery modules with a mobile app, and you see the blueprint for something bigger than teletherapy. You see a system engineered for growth without losing precision.
This $20 million fuels more than expansion. It builds the next phase: more clinicians, more coverage, deeper insurer ties, stronger state partnerships, and product innovation that scales responsibly. Rapaport and Rosenzweig didn’t choose the easy lane. They chose the messy one. And messy is where transformation happens.
