Compare / Spring Health vs OpenAI
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Spring Health
OpenAI
BUSINESS MODEL
Spring Health
B2B employer benefit — similar model to Lyra Health but with a sharper focus on precision matching. Companies pay Spring Health a per-employee-per-month fee.
Employees take an initial assessment and Spring Health's algorithm recommends a care pathway: therapy, medication management, coaching, digital self-care, or a combination. The key differentiator is the precision — the algorithm claims to reduce treatment time by 50% by getting the right match first instead of cycling through options.
Spring Health also provides a therapist network, psychiatric services, and crisis support. Revenue scales with employer contracts and employee utilization.
OpenAI
OpenAI makes money primarily through API access and subscriptions. The API charges developers per token (roughly per word) for using GPT models in their applications.
ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month for individual users, ChatGPT Team is $25-30/user/month, and ChatGPT Enterprise is custom-priced. Microsoft pays OpenAI licensing fees and also resells OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service.
OpenAI's annualised revenue ran past $13 billion during 2025 and kept climbing from there, which is the kind of growth curve that normally only exists in a pitch deck.
HOW THEY STARTED
Spring Health
April Koh was studying computational neuroscience at Yale when she encountered research on precision medicine for depression — the idea that you could use data to predict which patients would respond to therapy versus medication versus a combination. The existing system was essentially trial and error: try an antidepressant for six weeks, and if it doesn't work, try another one.
Meanwhile, patients suffer. Koh co-founded Spring Health in 2016 with Adam Chekroud, a Yale neuroscience PhD, to build a platform that uses machine learning to match employees to the right mental health treatment on the first try.
They started by publishing peer-reviewed research showing their algorithms could predict treatment response better than chance, then turned that research into a product that employers would pay for.
OpenAI
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. The founding donors — including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston — pledged $1 billion with a mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit all of humanity.
The idea was that AI was too important and too dangerous to leave in the hands of Google alone.
Sam Altman became chairman while Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe) became president. Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers alive, left Google Brain to become chief scientist.
The early team was stacked with world-class researchers who published their work openly — hence "Open" AI.
But AI research turned out to be staggeringly expensive. Training large models required millions of dollars in compute.
In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary — investors could earn up to 100x their money, but profits beyond that would flow to the nonprofit. Microsoft invested $1 billion.
The mission was still to save humanity. The method now involved making a lot of money first.
HOW THEY GREW
Spring Health
Enterprise sales to large employers, competing directly with Lyra Health, Headspace Health, and traditional EAP providers. Spring Health leads with outcomes data — publishing research showing faster recovery times and higher clinical improvement rates than industry benchmarks.
Celebrity advisor Apolo Ohno and high-profile board members gave early credibility. Series C at $2.5 billion valuation generated press coverage that opened doors.
International expansion to serve global workforces. Strategic investment from Kinnevik gave European distribution relationships.
Partnership with health plans to offer Spring Health as the behavioral health component within existing benefits.
OpenAI
ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was the growth strategy — it just wasn't planned that way. The team expected a modest research preview.
Instead, ChatGPT hit 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The product went viral because it felt like magic — for the first time, anyone could have a natural conversation with a machine that seemed to understand them.
The Microsoft partnership provided distribution at massive scale. Microsoft integrated OpenAI models into Bing, Office 365 (Copilot), GitHub (Copilot), and Azure.
Overnight, hundreds of millions of Microsoft users had access to OpenAI technology. Microsoft's $13 billion investment was the largest AI bet in history and gave OpenAI nearly unlimited compute.
The API created an ecosystem. Thousands of startups built products on top of OpenAI's models — from customer service bots to coding assistants to content generators.
Each API customer locked themselves into OpenAI's ecosystem, creating switching costs and recurring revenue.
THE HARD PART
Spring Health
Direct competition with Lyra Health, which is larger and better-funded. The employer mental health benefit space is crowded and increasingly commoditized — every startup claims better outcomes and faster ROI.
Therapist supply is the binding constraint across the entire industry. Proving that ML-driven matching actually produces better outcomes than simply having a good therapist network is a difficult clinical claim to substantiate at scale.
Employee engagement is everything — if employees don't take the initial assessment, the precision matching engine can't work. And the macro headwind: employer benefits budgets are under pressure, and mental health benefits are easier to cut than medical benefits when money gets tight.
OpenAI
The board crisis of November 2023 nearly destroyed the company. The nonprofit board fired Sam Altman as CEO on a Friday, citing a loss of confidence.
Within 48 hours, 95% of employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. By Tuesday, Altman was reinstated and the board was restructured.
The incident exposed the fundamental tension between OpenAI's nonprofit governance and its for-profit ambitions — a tension it finally addressed in late 2025 by restructuring the business as a public benefit corporation sitting under the original nonprofit.
The cost of training frontier models is eye-watering. Each new GPT generation costs hundreds of millions to train.
OpenAI is reportedly spending over $7 billion annually on compute. The company is burning through cash faster than almost any startup in history, which is why it keeps raising at higher and higher valuations.
If revenue growth slows before costs stabilize, the math gets ugly.
Safety concerns are not going away. Multiple prominent researchers have left OpenAI over disagreements about the pace of development versus safety research.
Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who was central to the board's decision to fire Altman, left in 2024 to start a safety-focused AI lab. The public debate about whether OpenAI is moving too fast — and whether its safety commitments are genuine — grows louder with every capability improvement.
THE PRODUCTS
Spring Health
Precision mental health platform — ML-driven assessment that predicts optimal treatment pathway for each individual. Therapist matching engine connecting employees to the right provider by specialty, approach, and predicted fit.
Spring Health Moments — bite-sized digital exercises based on CBT for mild symptoms. Medication management through in-house psychiatric providers.
Manager and HR tools for supporting teams without violating privacy. Work-life coaching for non-clinical needs like stress and work-life balance.
Family support extending benefits to dependents. Crisis support including 24/7 access for emergencies.
OpenAI
ChatGPT is the consumer chatbot — the product that made AI mainstream overnight. The flagship GPT models are multimodal, handling text, images, and audio in one system.
The OpenAI API lets developers integrate GPT into any application. DALL-E generates images from text descriptions.
Whisper transcribes and translates audio. Sora generates videos from text prompts.
GPT Store lets users create and share custom GPT agents. ChatGPT Enterprise gives businesses a private, secure version of ChatGPT with admin controls and no data training.
WHO BACKED THEM
Spring Health
Investors include Tiger Global Management, Kinnevik, Northzone, William K. Warren Foundation, and Able Partners.
Series C in 2022 valued the company at $2.5 billion.
OpenAI
Microsoft ($13B), Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, SoftBank, a16z