A Howard County startup that offers online counseling to children has acquired Hurdle Health, a 5-year-old D.C. company that provides online mental health support to people of color.
Youme Healthcare, a 2-year-old company based in Elkridge, announced the deal Tuesday, saying it has rebranded the company as Backpack Healthcare. Terms were not disclosed.
The newly named company will focus on providing mental health counseling to children and their families. It will be run by Youme founder Hafeezah Muhammad.
The two companies sprung from their founders’ own experiences with depression and mental illness.
Muhammad said in an interview that she founded Youme Healthcare to focus specifically on children’s mental well-being after her then 6-year-old son said he wanted to kill himself.
“It was the middle of the pandemic and I didn’t see it coming,” said Muhammad, who at the time was a vice president at Thriveworks, a mental health care company offering both in-person and online counseling. “It just broke my heart.
Kevin Dedner founded Hurdle three years earlier because he battled depression himself and was frustrated that many of the therapists he had seen over the years were often not attuned to the struggles of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC). A key initiative of Hurdle’s was developing a tool that measures “cultural responsiveness” and then providing therapists with appropriate training and coaching for treating Hurdle’s mostly BIPOC patients.
“The mental health care system, as we know it, was not designed for everyone,” Dedner told the Washington Business Journal in a 2021 interview.
Muhammed said she chose Backpack Health as the merged company’s new name because “everyone carries around an emotional backpack.”
And while Hurdle Health served patients of all ages, the newly created company is focused primarily on children, teens and their immediate families because that’s where Muhammed sees the greatest need. According to the nonprofit Mental Health America, more than 2.5 million children and teenagers struggle with depression and over the last several years suicide has emerged as the second leading cause of death among 10- to 24-year-olds.
Muhammed said Backpack Healthcare has about 50 full-time licensed therapists on staff and is looking to double that number by the end of the year. It offers sessions seven days a week and more than 95% of visits are covered by insurance, she said.
Hurdle Health was one of Washington Business Journal’s Inno on Fire awardees in 2021. Since its inception, it has raised more than $5 million in venture capital funding. Its founder, Dedner, will not be joining the merged company, but he said in a statement that Hurdle’s legacy will live on through Backpack’s “capable stewardship.”
"With alarming rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among youth, especially youth of color, the world needs Backpack,” he said.
