AI helps Virginia Beach startup launch foster care mental health platform

Michelle Turner used AI tools to learn startup basics, write a business plan and polish an investor pitch before launching Here Now Health from her Virginia Beach home. The mental-health platform began operating in January 2025 and now has 16 employees, with certification in three states to provide Medicaid-funded counseling for children entering the foster system.

Turner said she saw the need from her own experience as a foster parent, and she did not have an MBA or the usual startup credentials that often open doors with lenders, advisers and investors. In her telling, AI filled part of that gap by doing work that would otherwise have required expensive consultants or time in business school. “like going to a master’s level class every day,” she said.

Here Now Health is not an AI company. Its value lies in a very old business problem: how to start fast, raise money and build a regulated service before cash runs out. AI helped Turner move through the early tasks that stall many small firms, especially the planning and fundraising work that can consume weeks of draft after draft, while the company’s actual service still depends on licensed care, state certification and the confidence of families and public payers.

That tension is why the startup has become a useful case study in the larger U.S. debate over AI and productivity. The Federal Reserve has been examining how AI could affect productivity, inflation and labor demand, and businesses like Here Now Health show the technology’s near-term power may be less about flashy automation than about compressing the front end of entrepreneurship. For a founder without a deep network or a large balance sheet, AI can speed the move from idea to operating company.

The limits are just as important. A foster-care mental-health platform cannot afford sloppy accuracy, weak compliance or lost trust, especially when Medicaid dollars and children’s care are involved. AI may have helped Turner frame the business and launch it, but the company’s next test is the slower work of sustaining regulated services across three states while keeping the human relationships at the center of foster care.