The Story of Brightside: The Company Changing Mental Health Care From Art to Science

The Story of Brightside: The Company Changing Mental Health Care From Art to Science

The insight that would eventually become Brightside started in the most unlikely place: watching primary care doctors struggle with something they weren’t trained to do.

Brad Kittredge was working with a prominent U.S. health system when he noticed something troubling. The system had world-class facilities, respected physicians, and generous resources. Yet most of the mental health care was happening in brief primary care appointments with doctors who had minimal psychiatric training. The waiting list for therapy stretched twelve weeks. Getting a psychiatry appointment was nearly impossible unless someone’s life was at stake.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brad Kittredge, CEO & Co-Founder of Brightside, shared the origin story of building a virtual mental health platform that now serves 135 million Americans through their insurance. It’s a story about seeing systemic failure at the best institutions, connecting it to personal experience, and having the conviction to rebuild mental health care from the ground up.

When Excellence Isn’t Enough

Brad remembers the moment clearly: “These primary care doctors were overwhelmed by the demand for mental health care, and that’s really not what they were trained for. Everyone’s been to a PCP knows generally what they’re good at. Mental health care is kind of tangential.”

The structural problems created a vicious cycle. With twelve-week therapy waits and no access to psychiatry, PCPs couldn’t refer patients anywhere. So they were left to manage complex conditions like depression and anxiety through trial and error, with inadequate training and insufficient time.

“At this really well resourced health system, they had a twelve week wait for the next therapy appointment. So the PCPs didn’t want to refer anyone to therapy. They literally couldn’t get anyone in with psychiatry unless it was a life or death situation. And so they were left to sort of guess and check and do their best with these patients.”

For Brad, this wasn’t just a market insight. It was personal. “As I started to see that in more detail on the ground, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, because my dad has struggled with depression his whole life. And when he first sought care as an adulthood, from his first encounter to when he finally had some treatment work for him was about a ten year gap, because he fell through the cracks with referrals and follow ups and failed medication trials.”

The gap between what was happening and what should be happening became unbearable: “I just couldn’t sit with it. I couldn’t say, like, we’ve accepted this status quo as good enough, when there are tens of millions of people who need great care, are getting subpar care, even at our best health systems, and we know how to do better.”

The Contrarian Thesis

Before Brad wrote a line of code or recruited a single co-founder, he spent time understanding why the market was getting it wrong. By 2017, telemedicine was starting to gain attention. Companies like Teladoc were proving that remote care could work. But Brad saw everyone making the same mistake.

“Everyone talking about access, we’re sort of treating mental health care as a commodity, acting we just need more appointments, and if we have more appointments, we’ll solve this problem,” Brad explains. “But I said to myself, if we take that same crappy care that I saw at a great health system and move it online, we’re not solving the problem.”

His thesis was different: “What we need is to use this transition from traditional care to virtual care as an opportunity to remake them all from the ground up, to build it in a way that addresses the root causes of the quality issues and that we know can sustainably scale high quality care with proven outcomes.”

This wasn’t just positioning. It was the foundation for everything that would follow—the clinical model, the provider network, the data infrastructure, and eventually, the differentiation that would matter when competitors flooded the market.

Building the Team

With a clear thesis, Brad needed to convince talented people to take the leap with him. He reached out to Jeremy Barth for the technical co-founder role. Jeremy was happy in his current CTO position and wasn’t looking for anything new.

“He said, I’m not really looking anything for anything right now, but sure, let’s meet up and we’ll talk about it,” Brad recalls. “And so we met up. I gave him the pitch. I assumed that it was kind of just going to be a practice pitch. And he called me up the next day, and he’s like, I can’t say no.”

Brad found this response repeated itself as they built the team: “I found that to be a trend as we built our team that just so many people are touched by this challenge and this problem and inspired to want to do something about it that we’ve been able to attract just a really phenomenal team of people who really want to change the way that care is delivered.”

The final piece was Mimi Winsberg, a Stanford-trained psychiatrist with 30 years of practice experience. She brought the clinical rigor and credibility needed to build a provider network and publish research demonstrating their outcomes.

The Five-Month Sprint

Brad had constraints that focused his decision-making: two kids under three, a worried wife, and a hard deadline for raising their seed round. Jeremy started writing code in September 2017. They launched their alpha in January 2018.

The first hypothesis to test was simple: would consumers actually use remote mental health care? This was pre-pandemic 2017, when telemedicine adoption was in single digits and mental health still carried significant stigma.

Within a week of launching, they had their first revenue. “Within two days of maybe putting up our site with no ad spend or maybe $100 of ad spend, we got our first purchase. And so Jeremy got a text message on his phone with the stripe verification of a charge and he kept that screenshot. And the feeling that we had when that happened was like, oh man, this is real. This is going to work.”

Breaking Into Insurance

Proving consumer demand was one thing. Getting insurance companies to contract with them was another challenge entirely. Brad chose an unconventional path: start with cash customers, but collect their insurance information from day one.

When they had 500 Cigna members who had been customers for at least three months, Brad turned that data into a comprehensive 30-page report. “We analyzed all the data and turned it into like a 30 page report with a bunch of, you know, charts and takeaways and insights. And then I just went knocking on every door I could find at Cigna and tried to get intros.”

His pitch reframed the entire conversation: “Here are the results of the pilot you guys didn’t know you were doing with us. Because a lot of healthcare companies get stuck in pilot purgatory. And I didn’t want them to even suggest that’s how we start together.”

It worked. Brightside secured a national contract with Cigna while still a small startup, opening the door to contracts with other major insurers.

Planting a Flag

As the market matured and competitors entered, Brad faced a new challenge: differentiation. “We still found when were going to talk to payers and that we had many other competitors enter the market in that interim, that people were having a hard time telling us apart from everybody else.”

The solution came from a conversation with an executive from a suicide advocacy nonprofit. She challenged Brad’s approach of referring out high-risk patients: “You know what happens when you refer those people out? And I said, well, we’re trying to get them into in person care, which we assume is better for somebody with suicide risk. She said, those patients are a hot potato. No one wants to take them because no one’s trained specifically, or very few providers are trained specifically to treat suicidality.”

Brad saw the opportunity: “To me, that was just really planting a flag, saying, we are going to be the best at treating the hardest cases. We’re not going to shy away. We’re going to do the hard work. And that’s how we’re going to differentiate from everybody else in the market.”

Brightside built a comprehensive crisis care program for suicide prevention. They later acquired a substance use treatment company. The strategy was clear: own the high-acuity, high-cost segment that competitors were avoiding.

The Future: From Art to Science

Today, Brightside serves 135 million covered lives across all 50 states. But Brad’s vision extends beyond access and scale. He’s building toward something more fundamental.

“The big picture vision for brightside has always been to fundamentally change the quality of care that people receive for mental health conditions in the US. Certainly that involves timely access to care and a great experience with care. But in many ways, it really means changing mental health care from art to science.”

What does that transformation look like? Brad explains: “Historically, it’s been thought of more in the realm of art and just sort of individual practitioner discretion. And there’s so much opportunity to use evidence and data driven feedback loops and predictive analytics and AI to ensure that every patient receives personalized, data driven, evidence based care that drives measurable outcomes.”

It’s an ambitious vision—taking a field that has historically relied on clinical intuition and individual judgment, and systematizing it through data, evidence, and technology. Not to replace the human element, but to ensure that every patient benefits from the collective learning of thousands of cases, proven treatment protocols, and continuous feedback loops.

This is the throughline from that first insight in a well-resourced health system to the future Brad is building: the belief that we can do better, that we know how to do better, and that technology can help us deliver that better care at scale. Not by moving the status quo online, but by fundamentally remaking how mental health care works.