Founders with lived experience are well-equipped to design effective, scalable solutions for the communities they come from.
Thatâs the hypothesis behind Hopelab Ventures, a youth mental health impact investor that is quietly rewriting the rules of what early-stage funding can do. Nearly all of the founders in its portfolio have lived experience with the challenges their users face.
With over $12 million invested across 20 companies, Hopelab isnât just backing founders building tech-enabled mental health solutions for Black, Brown, Queer, and Medicaid-covered young people â itâs testing a bigger idea: that impact-driven capital, when coupled with rigorous impact measurement, can unlock social and financial returns.
This strategy isnât just about âdoing good:â itâs about creating impact that is measurable, scalable, and increasingly, investable.
Investing in lived experience
Thorough, multi-layered measurement doesnât happen by accident. Our teams at Hopelab and Intention 2 Impact (Hopelabâs impact measurement and evaluation partner) worked together to design a custom impact framework grounded in systems thinking, equity, and tangible outcomes.
Intention 2 Impact specializes in helping philanthropic investors and mission-driven funds make sense of their impact â not just to report it, but to learn from it, build on it, and use it to influence the broader field. With Hopelab Ventures, that meant translating bold investment hypotheses into measurable outcomes and designing tools to track progress from founder capacity to field-level change.
Across the board, the evidence is promising:
- Hazel Health, which provides mental and physical health care services through K-12 schools, tripled its reach since Hopelabâs initial investment, serving over five million students â 75% of whom are BIPOC, and 60% of whom are on Medicaid.
- Reflex AI, which uses AI-based tools to train crisis responders, scaled up from a handful of staff to 48 employees across six countries. The company now enables high-quality and culturally responsive crisis support for hundreds of thousands of people.
- In its first year of operation, Flourish Health, which specializes in treating serious mental illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia, was able to serve more than 100 adolescents who otherwise might not have received care because they did not qualify for hospitalization but their conditions were too high acuity for outpatient clinics.
- Across the portfolio, individual companies reported a 60% reduction in suicide risk, a 66% reduction in eating disorder symptoms, and significant improvements in youth mood, stress, and confidence.
Measurement as a mechanism for market credibility
For years, impact investing has wrestled with a reputation problem: that it is âconcessionary capitalâ â softer, slower, and less competitive. Part of that narrative persists because weâve accepted soft measurement.
Too often, impact reports count outputs (e.g., how many youth were served) without linking those numbers to the deeper outcomes that investors and decision-makers need to see: Did symptoms improve? Did access expand? Did the company survive, scale and become self-sustaining?
Hopelab Venturesâ impact measurement approach goes beyond the number of young people served. Companies in the portfolio aren’t just asked about who they reached â theyâre reporting on whether their solutions worked, whether theyâre still around and growing, and whether theyâre contributing to broader systemic change in youth mental health delivery systems. That includes metrics like:
- Clinical trial outcomes and regulatory milestones hit;
- Accessibility via Medicaid or public schools;
- Hiring and training culturally competent and diverse clinicians; and
- Shifts in how, where, and at what cost services are provided.
Hopelab isnât alone in this push. Funds like Pivotal Ventures, Acumen America, and the California Healthcare Foundation have long centered equity and community proximity as investment criteria. Whatâs needed now is a measurement strategy that validates those investments as not only impactful but financially and structurally sound.
Systems change starts with tracking what actually changes
Hopelab Ventures uses the âWaters of Systems Changeâ framework (originally developed by the consulting firm FSG) to track shifts in the youth mental health ecosystem. Instead of stopping at improved service delivery and the number of youth reached, the impact report captures changes in:
- Policies: Are companies contributing to new funding models, like school-based Medicaid reimbursement?
- Practices: Are providers changing how they deliver care based on these products?
- Resource Flows: Are portfolio companies attracting more investors into the youth mental health space?
- Relationships: To what extent is Hopelab Ventures brokering new relationships among companies, other funders, and other ecosystem partners?Â
- Power Dynamics: How, if at all, are power dynamics shifting to center young people and founders with lived experiences?
- Mental Models:Â Are new solutions contributing to new narratives and de-stigmatizing youth mental health resources?Â
This is rare in early-stage impact investing. But precisely this level of measurement helps de-risk investments for follow-on funders, especially those who want to invest in systems change but donât yet know how to quantify it.
Why this moment matters
Weâre at a critical inflection point: public funding for youth mental health is fragmented, VC dollars are drying up for âunprovenâ solutions, and philanthropic capital is being asked to do more with less. At the same time, demand for mental health services â particularly among Black, Brown, and Queer youth â is skyrocketing.
We need new models. But we also need proof points.
Thatâs what makes Hopelab Venturesâ impact data so timely. It not only affirms the core hypothesis â that investing in lived experience works. It also shows how to build an ecosystem where those companies can thrive: through strategic connections, Medicaid guidance, youth co-design, and board advocacy.
Most importantly, it makes a case to other investors that this isnât charity. These are viable businesses building validated solutions, and they deserve capital that matches their potential.
Toward shared learning infrastructure
One of the biggest takeaways from our impact evaluation wasnât just the outcomes â it was the call for shared infrastructure. Portfolio companies asked for youth-led research panels, founder peer spaces, and even physical co-working hubs.
Thatâs the next frontier: not just measuring impact in isolation, but designing ecosystems of learning, testing, and adaptation together.
Imagine if every early-stage impact fund published data on what worked, what didnât, and why. What if we built sector-level learning hubs across health, education, workforce, and climate that aggregated impact plus financial performance over time? What could we achieve if we finally had the tools to move beyond one-off stories into systems-level sensemaking?
Investing in youth mental health doesnât have to mean choosing between heart and returns. As Hopelab Venturesâ impact reporting shows, itâs possible for startups to generate impact and profit â with the right strategy, support, and measurement â and challenge the assumptions that have historically limited capital flows.
When we measure what matters, we make it harder to look away.
Nina Sabarre is the founder and CEO of I2I. Erin Sietstra is the head of investments for Hopelab. Arianna Taboada is the director of learning and impact at Hopelab.
