Voices of Healthcare · #22
April Koh
Co-founder and CEO
Spring Health
April Koh is co-founder and chief executive of Spring Health, which uses a short assessment to match employees with mental health care their employer pays for. She left a shopping app, returned to Yale, and built the company after watching her best friend cycle through antidepressants.
Growing Up Korean in New Jersey
She was born in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to the United States with her family at 4, growing up in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey. "Growing up Korean in a predominantly white neighborhood, I always felt like 'the other,' and that environment was very important in shaping me," she said. "That experience made me unafraid of being different and helped me carve my own path." Her father left a corporate job in energy to start his own company.
She was about nine when she first tried to talk to her mother about her mental health. "I felt that stigma pretty heavily through my Korean heritage, through my religious heritage, growing up in an Evangelical church," she said.
Co-founding a Shopping App
At Yale she studied sociology and computer science, and at a coding bootcamp there she met the co-founders of her first company, Spylight. She was its chief product officer, and the app let someone shop from a phone for an item seen on a television show. In 2013 she took leave from Yale and spent two years in Los Angeles, California, while Spylight raised $5 million. She decided she did not want her twenties spent helping people buy clothes, worked a few months on product at Shazam, and went back to Yale.
Watching a Friend Try Seven Antidepressants
Starting in 2010 her best friend tried seven antidepressants for severe depression. "Her psychiatrist said something like, 'Let's start with Lexapro' the first time she saw him," Koh recalled. "And we were both struck by how much it sounded like he was starting an experiment on her."
In January 2016 she and Abhishek Chandra, a Yale friend who had worked at Google, read Adam Chekroud's research on predicting which depression treatment would work. In May 2016 the three founded Spring Health in New York City, New York, and she finished her Yale degree that year.
Building Spring Health
The service starts with a confidential quiz, about four minutes in its 2018 form, that flags problems beyond anxiety and depression and builds a plan: a therapist with a specific approach, or self-help material. Spring Health keeps its own network of clinicians and, in 2018, cited an average wait of 1.7 days. Employers including Whole Foods, Gap, and Warby Parker were early clients, and about one in three employees at a customer company signed up.
On September 30, 2025, she appeared on the cover of TIME as one of the magazine's World's Most Influential Rising Stars.
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