Compare / Spring Health vs Zoom
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Spring Health
Zoom
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.
Zoom
Zoom uses a freemium model. Free accounts get unlimited one-on-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings.
Paid plans start at $13.33/month per user for Pro (meetings up to 30 hours), $18.33/month for Business, and custom pricing for Enterprise. Zoom also charges for add-ons — Zoom Phone (cloud phone system), Zoom Rooms (conference room hardware), and Zoom Contact Center.
The free tier is the hook. The 40-minute limit on group calls creates just enough friction to push power users to pay.
And once one person in a company pays, the whole team follows because nobody wants to be the one whose meetings keep getting cut off.
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.
Zoom
Eric Yuan grew up in Tai'an, a mining city in Shandong province, China. In the mid-1990s he was in his twenties and inspired by the internet boom happening in America.
He applied for a US visa. He was rejected.
He applied again. Rejected again.
Eight times in total over about two years before he was finally approved in 1997. He moved to Silicon Valley with barely any English and joined WebEx as one of its first engineers.
Yuan spent 14 years at WebEx, eventually becoming VP of Engineering. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion.
Yuan watched Cisco slowly bloat the product with enterprise features while the core video quality deteriorated. He kept telling Cisco leadership they needed to rebuild the product from scratch.
They kept saying no.
In 2011, Yuan quit and took 40 WebEx engineers with him. He founded Zoom Video Communications with a simple thesis: video meetings should just work.
No downloads. No lag.
No "can you hear me?" No IT department required. He built the product that Cisco refused to build.
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.
Zoom
Zoom grew on one thing: it worked. In a world where every video call started with five minutes of technical issues, Zoom calls just connected.
That reliability was the entire marketing strategy for the first five years.
The freemium model did the rest. Teachers, coaches, therapists, book clubs, and small teams all started on the free tier.
When they hit the 40-minute limit, enough of them converted to paid. And every free meeting was essentially a demo — everyone in the meeting saw how good Zoom was.
Yuan obsessed over simplicity. While competitors like WebEx and GoToMeeting required downloads, plugins, and IT involvement, Zoom worked in the browser with one click.
The learning curve was essentially zero. Your grandmother could figure it out.
That turned out to be extremely important when a pandemic suddenly required your grandmother to figure it out.
Then COVID happened. In March 2020, the world shut down.
Every meeting — work, school, family, doctor, church, happy hour — moved to video. Zoom was already the easiest option.
Daily participants exploded from 10 million to 300 million in four months. The stock went from $70 to $588.
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.
Zoom
The post-pandemic hangover has been severe. Zoom's stock peaked at $588 in October 2020 and crashed to under $70 by 2022 — an 88% drop.
The company went from the most exciting tech stock on the planet to a cautionary tale about pandemic valuations. Revenue growth slowed from 300%+ to single digits as people returned to offices and competitors caught up.
Security and "Zoombombing" were early crises. In early 2020, as millions of new users flooded in, trolls discovered they could join open Zoom meetings and share offensive content.
Schools, churches, and AA meetings were disrupted. It turned out Zoom's encryption wasn't truly end-to-end as advertised.
Yuan had to halt all feature development for 90 days and focus exclusively on security fixes. It was a near-death reputational crisis.
Competition from Microsoft Teams and Google Meet intensified. Both companies bundled video calling for free into products that hundreds of millions of people already used.
Microsoft Teams integrated directly into Office 365. Google Meet was built into Gmail.
Zoom had to compete against free products from two of the richest companies on Earth.
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.
Zoom
Zoom Meetings is the core — video calls that actually work. Zoom Webinars handles large-scale events with up to 50,000 attendees.
Zoom Phone is a full cloud-based phone system replacing traditional office phones. Zoom Rooms turns physical conference rooms into one-click video meeting spaces.
Zoom Contact Center competes with established call center software. Zoom Team Chat is their Slack/Teams competitor.
Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative digital canvas. Zoom Revenue Accelerator uses AI to analyze sales calls.
And Zoom AI Companion summarizes meetings and drafts messages.
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.
Zoom
Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures