Yury Yakubchyk, Elemy, on destigmatizing mental health to expand access to pediatric behavioral care

The Pulse by Wharton Digital Health

In this episode, we connected with Yury Yakubchyk, the founder and CEO of Elemy. Elemy is an industry leading tech enabled provider of high quality pediatric behavioral care. Inspired by his own personal journey in overcoming childhood ADHD, Yury co-founded Elemy to repair the flawed model of care for childhood behavioral conditions such as autism. Under Yury's leadership, Elemy has grown from 109 employees at the time of the company's seed round to more than 1,000 employees at present. Elemy raised $219M in their Series B funding round, catapulting the startup to unicorn status with a total valuation of $1.15B. Elemy's investors include prominent names such as SoftBank, Chelsea Clinton, and Ashton Kutcher. We discussed: -Inspired by the hustle of the informal economy of Queens, Yury co-founded two startups prior to Elemy. The common thread across all of his companies is solving a complex problem in an industry where consumers face many pain points. -Elemy’s focus on caring for high acuity pediatric populations through a hybrid model of care run on an integrated software platform that coordinates caregivers physically visiting patients at home. -The importance of destigmatizing mental health to accelerate the expansion of pediatric behavioral health services to more patients in need.