AI helps foster care startup scale from idea to business

Michelle Turner used AI to move Here Now Health from a home-office concept in Virginia Beach to a working mental-health company with 16 employees and certification in three states. The practical gain was not abstract efficiency, but speed: the tools helped her learn startup basics, draft a business plan and tighten her investor pitch without first building a full advisory team.

AI as the startup shortcut

Here Now Health is not an AI company. It is a virtual mental health and support-services provider for Medicaid members connected to foster care, including children in foster care or family preservation plans, youth adopted from foster care, young adults who have aged out and youth in the juvenile justice system. Turner used AI upstream, as a kind of on-demand founder coach, to bridge the gap between identifying a problem and building a company that could actually serve it.

AI did not replace the hard parts of entrepreneurship, but it lowered the barrier to starting them. Turner still had to find the care model, assemble the team, navigate state certification and begin serving a highly regulated population. AI compressed the early, expensive, knowledge-heavy phase that often slows down first-time founders, especially those without formal business training or access to a deep bench of consultants.

A foster-care model built around continuity

The company’s services are aimed at one of Medicaid’s most complex populations. Here Now Health supports parents, caregivers, foster parents and other supportive adults, while building trauma-informed care around children and young people who often move between placements and systems. Its goal is to reduce avoidable emergency-room visits and crises by improving continuity across those placements, which is a direct response to how fragmented foster-care care can be.

Turner’s background explains why the model is so specific. She has fostered more than 40 children and volunteered as a CASA, a Court Appointed Special Advocate. Rock Health’s profile lists leadership roles at a federally qualified health center, a global telehealth nonprofit and Hazel Health, and Healthworx lists her as a foster parent for more than five years. For children and teens in foster care, mental and behavioral health is the largest unmet health need, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics; Healthworx identifies mental health needs as the largest unmet health need for the same group.

The market is large, even if foster care is shrinking

The Administration for Children and Families’ FY 2024 AFCARS dashboard shows about 329,000 children were in foster care on September 30, 2024, down 3.2% from the prior fiscal year. Child Trends estimated that 344,000 children ages 20 and under lived in foster care at some point in 2024. FY 2024 data continued a multi-year decline in the number of children entering and remaining in foster care.

The system is shrinking in some places while still carrying a large and medically complex caseload.

The company serves members connected to foster care, but it also works across the adults who surround those children, including parents and foster parents. Continuity of care in foster settings is rarely just a clinician-to-patient relationship. It is a system problem that rewards platforms that can coordinate records, transitions and access without losing the thread when a child moves.

What scaling looks like after the AI assist

Here Now Health is a privately held company founded in 2025 with early-stage venture backing, and PitchBook names Impact Assets and Headstream among its investors. The business has moved from founder-led concept to financed operation, and the remaining work is not prompt-writing but hiring, compliance, clinical operations, payer relationships and state-by-state execution.

The company launched in January 2025. A founder with deep lived experience and little room for trial-and-error paperwork used AI to move faster through the earliest planning steps, then translated that speed into certification, staffing and service delivery.