Grow Therapy

GitPod

Grow Therapy

Two-sided marketplace for mental health. Therapists join Grow Therapy's network and the company handles insurance credentialing, claims billing, scheduling, and compliance.

In return, Grow Therapy takes a percentage of each session's insurance reimbursement. Patients search Grow Therapy's directory to find in-network therapists by specialty, insurance plan, and availability.

The therapist gets to focus on therapy. The patient gets affordable care.

Grow Therapy gets a cut for handling the business side. Everyone wins except the old credentialing companies that charged therapists thousands of dollars to do what Grow Therapy does for free.

GitPod

GitPod started as freemium: a free tier of monthly cloud hours, paid plans for more hours and bigger workspaces, and enterprise contracts with self-hosted and dedicated options. As Ona it shifted toward enterprise contracts for running AI coding agents inside a customer's own cloud, with governance and security controls.

It said enterprise annual recurring revenue quadrupled year over year before the rename. OpenAI acquired the company in 2026, and existing customer commitments continue to be supported.

Grow Therapy

Jake Cooper was working in healthcare operations when he saw the same problem from both sides. Patients couldn't find therapists who accepted their insurance.

Therapists wanted to accept insurance but the credentialing process took 6 to 12 months and the billing was a bureaucratic disaster. Most therapists just went cash-pay to avoid the headache, which meant only people who could afford $200 a session got care.

Cooper started Grow Therapy in 2020 to solve the plumbing problem. Not the clinical side — the administrative infrastructure that makes it possible for a therapist to see an insured patient without losing their mind.

He launched right as the pandemic made therapy demand explode and supply couldn't keep up.

GitPod

The GitPod team came out of TypeFox, a German developer tools company in Kiel behind the Theia cloud IDE framework. Sven Efftinge and his colleagues realized the biggest pain point was not the editor itself but the environment.

Developers spent hours configuring machines, installing dependencies and debugging "it works on my machine" problems.

They launched GitPod to provide instant, automated cloud development environments. One click from a GitHub or GitLab repo opened a fully configured workspace with dependencies installed and tools ready.

Johannes Landgraf, who became CEO, and CTO Christian Weichel later led the company through its rename to Ona in 2025 and its sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Grow Therapy

Supply-side acquisition — recruit therapists by solving their biggest pain point (insurance credentialing) for free. Once therapists are in-network through Grow Therapy, patients find them through the directory.

The company expanded insurance partnerships aggressively, getting in-network with Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, Anthem, and dozens of regional plans. State-by-state expansion tracking licensing requirements.

Content marketing targeting therapists frustrated with private practice admin. Referral loops from satisfied therapists bringing colleagues onto the platform.

GitPod

GitPod grew through open source community adoption and one-click integrations with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, where a "Gitpod" button on a repo launched a ready workspace. It later moved upmarket to banks and pharmaceutical companies that wanted cloud development under tight security.

In 2025 it bet the company on AI agents, renaming itself Ona and claiming its own agents were producing most of its merged code. That bet ended in a sale to OpenAI in 2026.

Grow Therapy

Insurance reimbursement rates for therapy are low and getting lower in some states. Grow Therapy's margin depends on volume because per-session economics are thin.

Keeping therapists on the platform once they're credentialed is a retention challenge — some therapists use Grow Therapy to get credentialed, then leave to handle billing themselves. Competition from Headway, Alma, and others doing similar things means the race to sign up therapists is intense.

Quality control across 10,000+ providers is a real concern. And the fundamental tension remains: insurance companies want to pay less per session, therapists need to earn enough to survive, and Grow Therapy sits in the middle trying to make both sides happy.

GitPod

GitHub Codespaces, backed by Microsoft and GitHub's enormous distribution, was a direct competitor, and AWS stopped taking new Cloud9 customers in 2024, a sign of how tough the cloud IDE market was. Convincing developers to give up their carefully configured laptops proved hard.

Then AI coding tools threatened to make the whole category a feature. GitPod's answer was to reinvent itself as Ona, an AI agent platform, and ultimately to sell to OpenAI in 2026 rather than compete alone.

Grow Therapy

Insurance credentialing — gets therapists paneled with major insurers in weeks instead of months. Automated billing and claims processing that eliminates the denied-claim nightmare.

A patient-facing directory with filters for insurance, specialty, location, and availability. Practice management tools including scheduling, intake forms, and session notes.

Telehealth platform built in so therapists don't need separate video software. Group practice support for therapists who want to scale beyond solo practice.

GitPod

Before 2025: cloud development environments, instant pre-configured workspaces defined in a .gitpod.yml file, with prebuilds and support for VS Code and JetBrains, plus a self-hosted enterprise option. As Ona (since September 2025): a platform for running software engineering AI agents in secure, sandboxed cloud environments, with VS Code in the browser and access from phone, tablet or laptop.

Since August 2026 the technology is part of OpenAI's Codex team.

Grow Therapy

Investors include Sequoia Capital, TCV, Signalfire, and SVB Capital. Series C in 2023 valued the company at over $1 billion.

GitPod

Speedinvest led the $3 million seed in October 2020, with Crane Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures US. General Catalyst led a $13 million round in April 2021.

GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner led the $25 million Series A in November 2022. Total funding was about $41 million.