Alongside Acquired by TimelyCare, Expanding Student Support

TimelyCare has acquired Alongside. Here's what excites me most: students are already turning to AI for support. The question was never "if" , it was "who would build it responsibly". Alongside did. Clinician-designed, safety-first, grounded in real clinical frameworks. Not a generic AI chatbot , a purpose-built platform that meets students in everyday moments of stress and loneliness, and knows when to escalate to human care. This is what responsible AI in healthcare actually looks like: not replacing clinicians, but extending the care continuum earlier, smarter, and more continuously than ever before. For us on the product and engineering side, this accelerates everything. We now have the building blocks for a truly AI-native "front door" and end-to-end student wellbeing platform. And to the Alongside team , welcome to TimelyCare. Incredible people united on a great mission. https://lnkd.in/gsU_EE9i

A big step forward for TimelyCare today. We started TimelyCare by expanding access to care when students need it—bringing campus-wide, no-cost support to students in a way that hadn’t really been done before. What’s become increasingly clear is that many students are struggling long before they ever reach that point. That’s where Alongside comes in. They’ve built something thoughtful, clinically grounded, and designed for real-world use—helping students navigate everyday challenges while maintaining strong safety guardrails. This isn’t about replacing care. It’s about expanding how and when students are supported. Proud of the team for getting this done—and excited to welcome the Alongside team.

In this conversation, our CEO Luke Hejl shares how early institutional skepticism became long-term partnership. From 4–6 week mental health wait times to 24/7 access across 500+ campuses, the focus has always been the same: deliver care that improves outcomes and strengthens institutions. ✅ 🎧 Listen to the full episode below. #Healthcare #Education #DigitalHealth #HigherEducation #studentwellbeing

Today Common Sense Media published the most rigorous independent assessment of AI wellbeing and mental health apps for teens to date. Alongside by TimelyCare earned the lowest risk rating of any AI-wellbeing app reviewed. ✅ We created a comprehensive safety system that caught every test input from shutting down racist comments to identifying symptoms of psychosis.  ✅ We chose to deploy through schools where our safety system identifies 100s of students suffering in silence every week and connects them to in person support in minutes.  ✅ We chose usage caps and non-sycophantic conversations and still have above industry standard engagement.  ✅ We chose to let independent researchers publish findings about us and have already made product adjustments based their feedback. While its easy to focus on the failures of other systems, I truly hope the industry sees this as a call to action that both safer technology and safer design is possible. I'm proud of what we've built and I am prouder that we're willing to be transparent and held accountable for it. A huge thank you to the amazing team who created our safety system Richard (Clarke) Heyes, Ph.D., Guido Entenberg, Dr. Blanca Jaure, Sergey Feldman, Anish Mehta, Michel Mansour, Rajat Kanti Nandi, & Sai Charan and so excited to continue to build out how we can provide safe & evidence based Tier 1 support to more students across the country through Timely Care! Full report: https://lnkd.in/es4N6EwG #StudentMentalHealth #AIPolicy #EdTech #YouthSafety

BIG NEWS! Alongside has been acquired by TimelyCare. Over the past several years, we partnered with 200+ schools and built a safe and effective clinician-designed AI coaching platform that helps prevent everyday challenges from becoming a mental health crisis. We have also been clear. Alongside is a bridge to human connection, not a replacement. TimelyCare shares that philosophy, and through this partnership, we will be able to support students across the full MTSS continuum from prevention to immediate crisis support and everything in between. Incredibly proud of what our team built and excited about where this goes!

AI can help us scale care—but it can’t replace care. The future of mental health depends on pairing technology with real human connection.

It was a pleasure to join Martin Cech and Health Tech Nerds to talk about Marble Health Before starting Marble, I taught in New York City. I watched kids come into class carrying things that had nothing to do with school — anxiety, trauma, situations at home — and I watched teachers and counselors try to hold them up with almost no resources to actually help. That experience informs everything we do at Marble, and underpins our mission of helping all kids thrive. We covered a lot of ground in this conversation: how we're thinking about AI's role in mental health support, what it's really like to build a model financed mostly by Medicaid, and how my time in the classroom directly shaped how we approach GTM. Grateful to the HTN team for having me on. And if you're interested in learning more about Marble, reach out.

We keep talking about the “student mental health crisis” like it’s temporary. It’s not. Demand for counseling and well-being support continues to outpace the number of licensed providers available on campuses — years after COVID supposedly peaked. And while awareness has increased, capacity largely hasn’t. At the same time, students expect care that reflects their identities, lived experiences, schedules, and realities. Rightfully so. But meeting those expectations with already-overwhelmed campus systems is incredibly hard. Higher Ed can’t keep responding to 2026 student needs with 2016 mental health infrastructure. Huge respect to providers like Seli Fakorzi, MA, LPC-S, and the TimelyCare clinicians doing this work every day despite the growing gap between demand and resources. https://lnkd.in/eatxNS_G #mentalhealth #highereducation #studentaffairs #telehealth #studentsupport #studentmentalhealth #virtualcare #equitableaccess #patientaccess #college #university

New White Paper on AI Safety for Youth and Young Adults! 👇 👇 👇 https://lnkd.in/eUpvpncD Safety has always been the priority at Alongside, and using an AI safety system has allowed us to refer thousands of students to immediate in-person support! After almost 4 years of R&D we are delighted to share a new white paper on responsible AI for youth, developed by the fantastic Richard (Clarke) Heyes, Ph.D. So proud of the collaboration between Richard (Clarke) Heyes, Ph.D., Sergey Feldman, and Anish Mehta, who have tirelessly developed, iterated, and monitored our safety system.

Big update: Alongside has been acquired by TimelyCare, a leading provider of virtual health and well-being services for schools and universities. I’m incredibly proud of what Alongside has built over the last few years. Together, we created a product that has supported youth across 19 states, helping students build skills for life's challenges and get connected to the right adults when they need more support. I’m also proud that Alongside has helped set a high bar for how AI can be used safely and responsibly with youth, as we established a leading framework for safe AI for youth: https://lnkd.in/eeP8smQH Building Alongside has been a really meaningful chapter in my life. Thank you to everyone who encouraged me, introduced us to schools, tested the product, or simply believed in what we were trying to do. --Scott