Five years ago, Brandon Terry and his wife Chloe received devastating news. Their newborn daughter had been diagnosed with a rare chromosomal deletion – one shared by fewer than 50 children in the world. At two months old, doctors told them she might never walk or talk.
This fall, like millions of other children across the country, she starts kindergarten.
That journey took years of layered therapy, tens of thousands of dollars, and a herculean fight that few outside her family ever witnessed. Brandon and Chloe became de facto case managers for their own daughter, holding a fragmented care team together because the system wasn’t built to do so. Watching their daughter’s progress, Brandon came to a realization: what he and Chloe faced wasn’t personal, it was a structural failure and families needed a solution.
Today, Upfront and our friends at Bling Capital, GTM Fund, and Perceptive Ventures are leading a $9.5M seed round in Village, the modern health system for specialty pediatrics that families of children with developmental, behavioral, or learning differences have never had.
The 1 in 5 Problem
~ 1 in 5 American children needs developmental, behavioral, or learning support. Autism alone affects 1 in 31 children per CDC monitoring data, a rate that has more than quadrupled since 2000.
The system designed to support these kids was never built for this level of demand. Speech-language pathologist waitlists average just over eight months before a child can begin services. Autism diagnostic evaluations commonly take six months to two years before a child can begin receiving care. And once a family has a diagnosis in hand, they often discover that more than a third of behavioral health providers don't accept insurance – mostly because the administrative burden of accepting insurance doesn’t make sense financially for in-demand specialists.
A child waits a year for an evaluation. Another year to match with a therapist and begin treatment. Meanwhile, the family is paying out of pocket because in-network providers are full. The cognitive and financial toll is enormous, and lands entirely on these exhausted families.
Building a Village
Village consolidates the entire pediatric therapy journey into one place. Discovery, credentialing, care coordination, and billing are all powered by an AI care navigator. Families are matched with vetted, in-network occupational therapists (OTs), physical therapists (PTs), speech-language pathologists (SLPs), and behavioral specialists in minutes rather than months, with insurance and clinical needs verified upfront. Providers get a complete operating system for their practice, finally making it economically viable to accept insurance.
Ultimately though, the biggest unlock is care coordination. When a child is seeing a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, and a behavioral specialist at the same time – which is quite common – all three providers work inside Village, sharing session notes, progress, and async messaging on one platform. Parents stop being the messenger between providers who should already be talking, and the care team finally starts behaving like one.
Why We Invested
Brandon and his co-founder Allan Smith are exactly the team to build this. Brandon was the 13th employee and first product manager at Procore, where he built the product organization that helped to take the company past $400M in ARR. Allan led Engineering across multiple divisions at Procore after being a Lead Software Engineer at Microsoft, and joined Brandon after seeing the same broken system play out firsthand at his wife's physical therapy practice. The team recently added seasoned leaders across payer contracting, growth, and provider success, the three areas that will determine whether a platform like this is able to scale.
Pediatric care is one of the few healthcare verticals where the long-term payment model is still up for grabs. Specialty therapy in particular has been built on a fragmented fee-for-service foundation that rewards hours billed vs outcomes achieved – driving inconsistent quality and increasing scrutiny from payers. As payers begin to reassess coverage, access is being constrained – not because these therapies don’t work – because there are no clear, outcomes-based standards tying cost to quality. The next era of pediatric reimbursement will reward those who can define and prove what is “best,” establishing measurable, multidisciplinary standards of care and using outcomes data to align payment with results. Whether through bundled, capitated, or value-based models, coverage will increasingly hinge on a provider’s ability to demonstrate real progress in a child’s development.
That shift makes the platform owning the credentialing, coordination, and outcomes layer foundational to care. By defining provider quality, orchestrating multidisciplinary care, and capturing longitudinal outcomes data, Village is well positioned to evolve beyond a care delivery platform. Over time, what begins as a place to coordinate PT/OT/SLP evolves into the clinical and contracting infrastructure that payers and provider networks depend on to underwrite and scale value-based care.
What's Next
The team plans to use this funding to deepen its presence in Southern California, open additional metros, grow its AI infrastructure, and expand into specialties that families need. There are 65 million kids in this country. A fifth of them are growing up inside a system that wasn't built for them — the same system Brandon and Chloe navigated for years on their own. We’re proud to be leading this round, and to play a small role in building the system these families have always deserved. If you’re passionate about changing pediatric care in the US, Village is hiring!