Boulder Care, a telehealth addiction treatment company, is positioning itself to follow in the footsteps of major telehealth players like Livongo, Teladoc and Brightline.
The company has been expanding rapidly, and it’s betting on two new industry veteran hires, Mitzi Yue and Meena Narayanan, to propel the company to the ranks of the most successful telehealth companies.
Boulder Care, one of the Fierce 50 of 2024 honorees, closed a series C funding round in May that raised $35 million led by Advance Venture Partners. Stripes, First Round Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Laerdal Million Lives Fund also participated. It did so amid the difficult fundraising landscape for digital health and regulatory confusion over the prescription of controlled substances via telehealth.
In the last year, Boulder Care has introduced a program for adolescents who struggle with addiction, and it has doubled its total number of patients served. Founder and CEO Stephanie Strong said the company expects to grow at the same rate, or faster, in 2025.
The seven-year-old company recently attracted two digital healthcare industry veterans. Yue joined as head of finance, and Narayanan is now head of people.
Yue will join Boulder Care starting Nov. 11. Yue began her career at J.P. Morgan working in digital health. She continued working at the intersection of finance and digital health at Brightline, Genome Medical and Castlight. Before Boulder Care, she was the chief financial officer and chief strategy officer at Quilted, acquired by not-for-profit healthcare organization MultiCare in October.
Yue explained that a company’s financial strategy is fundamental to reaching ambitious goals. She joined Boulder Care due to its strong clinical outcomes, growth potential and commitment to its values.
When Yue was at Castlight, she served as head of culture, employee engagement and internal communications, along with her finance role. She said working on company culture has shifted her view on finance.
"That has really been the cornerstone of my entire belief system, that finance, every number on a page, has a consequence," Yue said.
She continued: "The other thing is about finance, in this specific industry, I think it's ever growing and ever evolving ... and so marrying the finance with strategy just becomes something that's really interesting."
Narayanan was a key player on weight loss platform Livongo’s human resources team. Narayanan helped scale the organization from less than 70 employees when she joined to more than 900. She was with Livongo through its initial public offering, which is widely regarded as the most successful digital health IPO in recent years.
Once Livongo was acquired by Teladoc in 2020 for $18.5 billion, Narayanan served as an HR executive at Teladoc for four years.
To take Boulder Care along the same route as Livongo, Narayanan said her strategy is to invest in people.
“My ethos philosophy always has been around people … bringing those people-centric programs where there's a lot of respect, there's a lot of empathy and people generally take a lot of ownership, pride, and joy,” Narayanan said. “The cultural programs are all going to be around making Boulder’s culture a very performance-oriented culture that aligns to the mission, and then we can also take the time to recognize [and] invest in our people.”
Since January, Boulder Care has increased its head count by 30%. In 2025, the company seeks to expand its service line and enter into new states.
“The key differentiator, like I said, it's just to make sure that we keep the essence of our culture intact and deepen as we grow. I think that's been my biggest learning from Livongo,” Narayanan said.
In August 2024, Boulder was recognized by Inc. magazine as one of America’s fastest-growing companies, and, in September, it won Fortune and Great Place to Work’s Best Workplaces in Health Care.
“I felt never more optimistic about the work that we're doing as innovators and the impact that we're having on real people's lives,” Strong said. “I think it's been a challenging and tumultuous past few years in digital health fundraising. We've been really fortunate to have investors who have seen our long-term vision is the incredible value that you can create over time when you're providing excellent care [and] social services model.”