Thrive Therapies Raises $7.7 Million to Scale Healthcare for Children with Disabilities Inside Schools

Round led by LiveOak Ventures backs former Vanderbilt researcher Dr. Kristin McGraner's outcomes-first model, as districts nationwide face a shortage of therapists and a rising number of students with disabilities who need them

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Thrive Therapies, a tech-enabled pediatric healthcare company, today announced $7.7 million in funding led by LiveOak Ventures, with participation from Activate Venture Partners and the Charter School Growth Fund. The company, which delivers therapy, evaluations and behavioral health care to students with disabilities in more than 200 schools and districts across six states, will use the round to expand into new markets, grow its clinical teams, and advance Thrive Clinical, its clinical intelligence platform.

Speech-language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, school psychologists and behavioral health clinicians are in short supply nationwide, making it difficult for school districts to serve the needs of more than 8 million children with disabilities. To be reimbursed for these federally required healthcare services, districts have to bill Medicaid, a time-consuming and often insurmountable process that leaves reimbursement unclaimed and consumes clinician capacity districts cannot spare.

Thrive delivers the care itself, with its own clinicians working inside schools, face-to-face with students, teachers and families. Most systems measure therapeutic effectiveness annually, versus at the session level, and a child can lose a year to that lag. Thrive Clinical, which has documented more than 18,000 therapy sessions to date, closes this gap with real-time reporting.

The same record that documents a child's progress supports the district's Medicaid claim, so districts stop leaving money unclaimed. And clinicians stop losing evenings to paperwork, which supports both their longevity in the profession and continuity of care for the children they serve.

Early outcomes across Thrive's school systems:

• More than 85 percent of students met their annual IEP goals.
• 46 percent of students met their goals and no longer required services, against a national average near 8 percent, returning clinician capacity to the students who need the most support.

"I've been on every side of this. I ran a school system that paid for these services, I spent years researching whether they worked, and I was a child whose disability was identified late," said Dr. Kristin McGraner, founder and CEO of Thrive Therapies. "The constant was that nobody could tell us precisely what a child needed, early enough to matter. That's what we built Thrive to fix."

"Dr. Kristin McGraner and the team at Thrive bring a rare combination of education and clinical leadership and proprietary technology to serve both children and the schools that support them," said Krishna Srinivasan, board member and founding partner, LiveOak Ventures. "Thrive has already shown strong traction across multiple regions, and it signals a massive shift in how special education services are delivered, measured and paid for."

Thrive serves public school districts in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Washington under multi-year contracts, with additional deployments underway.

McGraner spent eleven years as founder and CEO of STEM Preparatory Academy, ranked among Tennessee's highest-performing school systems by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes and the state's strongest for multilingual learners. Before that, at Vanderbilt's Peabody College, she directed federally funded research teams across four states studying policy and outcomes for students with diverse needs, and testified before state legislatures on special education and workforce quality.

About Thrive Therapies

Thrive Therapies is a tech-enabled pediatric healthcare company delivering therapy, evaluations and behavioral health care to children with disabilities inside schools, combining clinical excellence, data intelligence, Medicaid revenue cycle management and outcomes reporting. Thrive serves schools across Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Washington. thrivetherapiesgroup.com

About LiveOak Ventures

LiveOak Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Austin, Texas. With over 25 years of successful venture investing in Texas, the founders of LiveOak have helped create nearly $5 billion of enterprise value. A complete life cycle investor focused on technology and technology-enabled service companies, LiveOak has nearly $500M under management and has led investments in over 80 high-growth Texas-based companies, including AmplifAI, Closinglock, Digital Pharmacist, DISCO (NYSE: LAW), Homeward, Osano, SchooLinks, and Take Command Health. Recognized twice in the last five years as the Venture Capital Firm of the Year at the A-List awards by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, LiveOak is dedicated to supporting local founders, fostering the next generation of leaders, and building category-dominating companies.

About Activate Venture Partners

Activate Venture Partners leads seed-stage rounds for exceptional founders of technology-enabled businesses from offices in Bethlehem, PA, and New York City. More than half of Activate's portfolio tackles challenges faced by patients, providers, payers, and biopharma. Exits include Medidata (IPO), MapMyFitness (Under Armour), FSA Store (H.I.G. Capital), Sapphire Digital (Zelis), Digital Pharmacist (K1), and Iris Healthcare (Aledade).

About Charter School Growth Fund

As a national nonprofit, the Charter School Growth Fund makes multi-year, philanthropic investments in talented education leaders from around the country who are building networks of excellent public charter schools. CSGF seeks to expand the impact of existing schools that are helping students achieve excellent outcomes. To date, CSGF has funded over 1,600 schools that serve more than 725,000 students in 32 states, DC, and Puerto Rico.