Meet the 2026 Tampa Bay Wave HealthTech|X Cohort: 15 Startups Advancing Behavioral Health and Addiction Innovation

This week, 15 startups focused on behavioral health and addiction will join the 2026 HealthTech|X Accelerator, beginning a program that will connect founders with healthcare expertise and resources across Tampa and Nashville.

The cohort is the first developed in collaboration with the Brock Family Center for Applied Innovation at Vanderbilt Health and Brock Recovery Group. For the first time, Tampa Bay Wave Accelerator programming will span dual cities and healthcare ecosystems: Tampa and Nashville.

Programming begins in Tampa, with founders spending the week connecting with the region’s healthcare, entrepreneurial and investment communities. A welcome reception will take place Wednesday before programming continues next week in Nashville.

For the founders selected for this year’s cohort, that means more opportunities to build relationships across two regions with significant healthcare expertise and resources.

“HealthTech innovation depends on strong connections between founders and the people who understand the challenges they’re trying to solve,” said Linda Olson, president and CEO of Tampa Bay Wave. “By bringing Tampa and Nashville together through this program, we’re giving these companies access to two healthcare ecosystems and a broader network of expertise, relationships and opportunities that can help them build and scale.”

Meet the 2026 HealthTech|X Cohort

This year’s cohort brings founders from across the country to Tampa and Nashville, with companies approaching behavioral health, addiction and healthcare delivery from different angles.

• Aria (Seattle): A digital health company expanding access to behavioral healthcare.
• CARI Health, Inc. (San Diego): Developing rapid medication monitoring to support personalized methadone dosing and treatment retention.
• Eiro Inc. (Nashville, Tenn.): Building infrastructure to support value-based behavioral healthcare.
• Elevare Health (Boston): Providing clinical AI infrastructure to extend maternal healthcare beyond the clinic.
• Happy: Frictionless Mental Health (New Orleans): Providing proactive, human-led mental health support through dedicated Support Givers.
• Huml Health (Bentonville, Ark.): Using wearables to make behavioral health measurable and help providers identify warning signs early.
• Innsightful (Sunnyvale, Calif.): Developing technology to support behavioral health assessment and care.
• Kivira (New York): Integrating behavioral health assessment, treatment guidance and progress tracking into primary care workflows.
• Laptis (Boston): Using AI to connect people with substance use disorders to the appropriate level of care.
• Outro Health (New York): Providing clinician-guided, evidence-based care for patients safely tapering off antidepressants.
• Pathroot Health (Salem, S.C.): Helping addiction treatment programs engage families to support admissions, retention and referrals.
• Psyrin (San Francisco): Automating clinical evaluations to help behavioral health providers expand patient capacity.
• Seek Health (New York): Providing operational intelligence to help healthcare facilities improve clinical coordination and patient flow.
• SpaceRx (Reston, Va.): Developing treatments for nicotine addiction and opioid-induced respiratory failure.
• Thrive Genetics (Broomall, Penn.): Using AI and genetic, behavioral and environmental data to identify addiction risk and support prescribing decisions.

Connecting Two Healthcare Ecosystems

A strong accelerator is ultimately shaped by the connections founders can make and the expertise they can access.

Through the Vanderbilt Health collaboration, HealthTech|X companies will have access to researchers, clinicians, informaticists and health system leaders, along with opportunities to explore clinical research partnerships, technology transfer and licensing of university technologies.

“Vanderbilt Health and the Brock Family Center for Applied Innovation are excited to collaborate with Tampa Bay Wave to welcome innovative behavioral health and addiction-focused startups into the HealthTech|X cohort,” said Ken Holroyd, MD, MBA, director of Brock Family Center. “Together, we look forward to connecting founders with Nashville’s vibrant healthcare innovation ecosystem and providing exposure to Vanderbilt Health’s world-class clinical, research, and entrepreneurial resources to accelerate their business progress.”

In Tampa Bay, founders will enter an established healthcare ecosystem that includes Tampa General Hospital, BayCare, AdventHealth, USF Health, Moffitt Cancer Center, the Tampa Medical Research District and other community health providers.

Connecting those resources with Nashville creates a wider network around the cohort and another avenue for relationships between founders, healthcare leaders, researchers, investors and potential partners.

Building From Tampa to Nashville

HealthTech|X will continue with virtual engagement between sessions and pitch nights in each market before culminating in a remote Demo Day in January 2027.

For Wave, the dual-city format reflects a broader opportunity: to build stronger connections between innovation communities while giving founders access to the people and institutions that can help them navigate the complexities of building healthcare companies.

“This cohort represents exactly why we wanted to build HealthTech|X across Tampa and Nashville,” said Dr. Richard Munassi, MD, MBA, Accelerator Managing Director, Tampa Bay Wave. “Some of the biggest issues our society faces in both behavioral health and addiction and being tackled by these companies and it takes world class founders to do it; this group definitely has them, with cohort founder backgrounds including premier academic institutions such as Vanderbilt, West Point, MIT, UC San Diego, Cal Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, Columbia University in the City of New York, Oxford, King’s College, NYU, University of Chicago, University of Virginia, and more. Their work experience/backgrounds are just as impressive, including NASA, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Visa, SAP, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the US Army, and more. We are proud to support these founders now and into the future, and to welcome them to our portfolio.”