#StartupsEverywhere: ATLANTA, GA.
#StartupsEverywhere: Adekunle “Ade” Oyaniyi, Co-Founder and CEO, & Ayobami "Ayo" Adewole, Co-Founder and CTO, Alehra
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Modernizing the Behavioral Health Experience
Alehra, an Atlanta-based startup co-founded by Ayobami "Ayo" Adewole and Adekunle "Ade" Oyaniyi, is a purpose-built "operating system" for behavioral health created to eliminate the administrative burnout caused by fragmented software systems. Their approach enables providers to prioritize patient care over manual paperwork by unifying scheduling, clinical documentation, and billing into a one-stop-shop platform, while also allowing practices to integrate their own preferred tools. We sat down with Ayo and Ade to discuss the origins of Alehra, the role of agentic AI in modern care, their talent and funding journeys, and the policy hurdles that founders in highly regulated industries face.
Tell us about your background. What led you to found Alehra?
Ade: My background is in software engineering, architecture, and engineering leadership. I've spent over a decade building enterprise software systems across health care, finance, data platforms, and large-scale business applications. Ayo and I saw a gap in behavioral health technology; many providers and practice owners are overwhelmed by fragmented systems and administrative burnout. Existing platforms were built around billing rather than actual care delivery.
Ayo: I have 15 years of experience building enterprise software applications across multiple continents. Post-COVID, we had a sit-down with folks in behavioral health and realized they were spending much of their time not on delivering care, but on mundane documentation, note-taking, and billing. We realized we could build a system that takes that off their plates so they can have a one-stop shop where they basically do everything.
What is the work you are doing at Alehra?
Ayo: It’s an operating system for behavioral health providers. Historically, they had to use one service like Zoom for virtual sessions, a payment processor like Stripe for payments, and another tool to draft notes. Alehra is a one-stop operating system to manage their practice. We are the first agentic AI-powered electronic health record (EHR). When a session is done, an AI agent performs note summarization and review in the background. It flags items if, for example, somebody is saying they are suicidal or depressed, and it generates action items for the provider. It’s not just the agents deciding everything; human review is in the loop.
How do you handle privacy and security, especially as you’re working with patient data?
Ayo: We are Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and General Data Protection Regulation compliant, but the most important part of our privacy strategy is that we do not train our AI agents with patient data. We use open-source datasets and Gemini-generated seed data for fine-tuning. For actual patient interactions, our system is fully encrypted and built on the Google Cloud Platform, with role-based access control to prevent information from 'bleeding' across the multi-tenant architecture. We also provide practices with configuration settings to define their own data retention policies, and then they decide how long their transcripts are stored.
What are the challenges of training AI in a field as sensitive as behavioral health?
Ayo: There are AI agents that we can build today that would probably even simplify the workflow of patients and providers if we had wiggle room to use some anonymized patient data to train. But we can't even do that because patient data, whether it's anonymized or not, it’s not allowed for training. Those are some of the roadblocks and bottlenecks we might not encounter if policies were being written by people who understand how AI works and how it’s being used.
What has hiring talent in the U.S. been like?
Ayo: It's challenging to find the specialized expertise we need. There’s talent everywhere, but we are working at the intersection of cutting-edge machine learning and health. So it's either you find somebody who is in the healthcare space, and they don't have a machine learning (ML) experience, or you find somebody who has ML experience, but they don't really know a lot about the health space. So that's been a major challenge we've had, finding someone with domain knowledge of both areas. Over the last two years, we've successfully brought people on board and provided them with proper onboarding tools, and training, to help them get up to speed on the domain we cover.
What has your fundraising journey looked like, and what hurdles do technical founders face in this space?
Ayo: We have primarily bankrolled what we have built to this point. We knew we were working in a newer industry, and early investors are still playing catch-up. Historically, when you are building an EHR, people understand, but when you're building an AI-powered EHR, then everybody is like, "whoa, AI. What are you doing with AI in this industry?"
Ade: Access to funding and support for early-stage technical founders in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, is another area that needs attention from policymakers. Building in healthcare requires significant investment in security and infrastructure before revenue can scale, and funding systems are often still optimized for founders with existing networks or traditional venture assets.
Are there any local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
Ayo: States’ professional licensing systems are a major bottleneck. A California-licensed provider often cannot provide care to a patient in Georgia or Maryland. If governments could centralize licensing—allowing a provider licensed in one state to practice in another—it would go a long way in broadening access to care. It would also allow us to scale our 'Alehra Care' feature, which aims to help providers reach patients across state boundaries.
What are your goals for Alehra moving forward?
Ayo: Our goal is to put Alehra in front of every behavioral health provider, whether they are a solo therapist or a group with 200 clinicians. We want to lower the technology barrier in the sector while running compliant, efficient, and patient-centered practices. By letting the system handle administrative heavy lifting, we allow providers to focus on what they do best, which is caring for their patients.
Ade: Ultimately, our mission is to build infrastructure that helps providers deliver better care more efficiently. We want Alehra to become the platform that modernizes care delivery beyond behavioral health. Healthcare technology should be intelligent, accessible, connected, and supportive for both clinical outcomes and operational efficiency.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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