April Koh, co-founder and CEO of AI-powered mental health care company Spring Health, says her Korean identity and the drive she inherited from Korean culture helped shape her path as an entrepreneur. Koh, who co-founded Spring Health in her early 20s, is widely recognized in the AI industry as one of the world’s youngest female CEOs of a unicorn company.
In an exclusive interview with The Korea Daily at the Milken Global Conference on May 4, Koh said growing up Korean in the United States taught her not to fear being different.
“Growing up Korean in a predominantly white neighborhood, I always felt like ‘the other,’ and that environment was very important in shaping me,” Koh said. “That experience made me unafraid of being different and helped me carve my own path.”
Born in South Korea, Koh moved to the United States with her family when she was 4 years old. She said the experience of navigating two cultures gave her both resilience and independence.
Koh also pointed to what she described as a distinctly Korean sense of urgency and determination.
“Koreans have a powerful drive to solve problems,” she said. “I am proud that Korea has produced world-class products and exports, and I believe that same creativity and excellence exist within me as well.”
That mindset, Koh said, has carried into her work building Spring Health, a company now valued at $3.3 billion and providing services in more than 200 countries, including South Korea.
“The reason I started the company was to eliminate all barriers to mental health care,” Koh said. “Our goal is to use AI to connect each person with the right treatment from the beginning and provide continuous care that can last throughout their lifetime.”
Spring Health describes itself as the first AI-native mental health platform operating at scale. Koh said the company uses AI to match each individual with appropriate care from the start, while also improving accessibility and treatment quality.
She said the company’s strength lies in combining data with mental health care.
While mental health treatment can appear subjective, Koh said Spring Health measures users’ initial conditions and treatment progress through industry-standard assessment tools. That data allows the company to understand how users enter care and how they improve over time.
“For a machine learning model to work, you need data on whether the treatment was effective,” Koh said. “From the beginning, we built the platform in a way that allowed us to collect that data.”
She said Spring Health helps users recover with half the number of sessions and in half the time compared with competitors, a result that also helps reduce overall health care costs for insurers and employers.
Koh said AI safety is another major focus for the company. When Spring Health began integrating generative AI into its products, the company found that there was no clear standard for evaluating whether AI could operate safely and ethically in mental health care.
In response, Spring Health developed VERA-MH, an open-source benchmark for AI safety in mental health. The benchmark evaluates how large language models assess suicide risk, self-harm risk and the risk of harm to others, as well as whether they properly escalate serious cases to human professionals.
Spring Health has continued to expand its business. On May 1, the company acquired Alma, a mental health services network.
Koh said her long-term goal is to make mental health care something that follows people throughout life, rather than a service limited to workplace benefits.
For young Korean and Korean American professionals, Koh emphasized the importance of building one’s own future.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” Koh said.
“I did not start the company because I wanted to become the CEO of a large company,” she added. “I started it because I wanted to remove barriers to mental health care. Find something you are truly passionate about, think about how you can use it to make the world better, and then pour all of your energy and your life into it.”
