Meet Sonar: Setting the Standard for Safe Youth Mental Health Support

A teenager sits on the edge of their bed, phone glowing and thumbs moving fast. They're not texting a friend or calling a parent, but asking an AI chatbot what to do about the panic in their chest, the loneliness at lunch, the dread that shows up at night. This scene is more common than we think.

A 2025 Pew survey found that 64% of U.S. teens use AI chatbots, and nearly 1 in 5 young people now turn to one when they feel sad, anxious or stressed, close to the share who see a mental health professional. So how can we make sure these platforms are safe, effective and worthy of the trust young people already place in them?

Sonar offers a different answer. Rather than a chatbot, every youth-facing message on Sonar's platform comes from a trained “Wellbeing Coach”, with AI working only in the background, not talking to young people directly. Sonar works inside the settings young people already know, partnering with schools, clinics and hospitals to strengthen the care around them. This approach has drawn notice, with Common Sense Media and Stanford Medicine's Brainstorm Lab for Mental Health Innovation describing Sonar as "the standard every product in this space should be held to."

Building with young people was Sonar’s instinct from the start, and SecondMuse’s Headstream program helped turn that instinct into discipline, pairing the Sonar team with youth co-creators, mentors and advisors who pushed their thinking, kept them grounded in the lived experiences of the young people they serve and helped them find their footing as the company grew.

Sonar’s model is already moving into new settings. In June 2026, Sonar announced its first partnership with a children’s hospital, teaming up with Akron Children to give patients ages 13 and older round-the-clock, text-based support, extending care beyond the clinic and into the hours when young people most often reach out.

To better understand how Sonar has approached this work and what they've learned along the way, we spoke with founder and CEO Drew Barvir:

1. What inspired you to start Sonar, and what shaped your conviction in a human-led model?

Drew: Sonar started from a personal place. Mental health has shaped my own family and people close to me, and I came to Stanford knowing I wanted to work on something that made support more preventative, accessible and scalable for young people. The same themes kept surfacing in our research. Young people were struggling long before they reached a clinical level of need, but cost, stigma, wait times, geography and capacity constraints meant many never got support early enough. More of them were already turning to AI for help, whether or not those tools were built to support them safely.

That shaped our conviction in a human-led model. AI can help with access, personalization, speed and cost, but youth mental health is defined by edge cases. Self-harm, bullying, abuse, grief, moments of crisis. In those moments, the right next step depends on context, and the answer cannot be to hand a young person a hotline number and end the conversation. Young people need tailored, step-by-step support from a real person who can read the situation, stay with them, de-escalate, and involve trusted adults when needed. AI is most promising when it augments people rather than replacing them, so at Sonar it supports our trained “Wellbeing Coaches” so they can respond faster and catch important signals, while the relationship, judgment, and responsibility stay human.

2. Once you decided to build Sonar, you made a distinctive choice to keep a Well-being Coach in the loop on every youth-facing message. How did co-creating with young people shape the model, and where did their perspectives challenge your assumptions?

Drew: Co-creation changed almost everything about how we built Sonar and how we talk about it. It is easy for adults to design what we think young people should want. Youth pushed us toward what they would actually use. They helped us see that the experience needed to feel immediate, private, and normal. Not another clinical portal, not another app asking them to finish a module. More like a safe text thread with someone who listens, understands how teens communicate and does not make them feel judged.

They also challenged our assumptions about AI. Many were comfortable with technology playing a role, but they wanted clarity and trust, and to know a real person was behind the experience when a conversation turned serious. That pushed us to describe Sonar less as AI for youth mental health and more accurately as human-led support, made scalable through AI. Our Changemakers and youth advisors still shape tone, onboarding and product decisions today. The bar is not whether adults think Sonar sounds good. It is whether young people feel safe enough to open up and come back when they need support.

3. Common Sense Media and Stanford's Brainstorm Lab recently called Sonar the standard to which every product in this space should be held. How do you make sure Sonar meets young people’s needs in a culturally responsive, age-appropriate way?

Drew: We try to make cultural responsiveness and age-appropriateness operational rather than aspirational. That starts with who helps build the product, who delivers support, what content the AI is trained on, and what safeguards surround every conversation. Sonar is designed with direct input from young people across different racial, cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, and identity backgrounds. That matters because we support a diverse population. Across our deployments, the majority of youth we support are young people of color, roughly half are low-income, and a meaningful share live in rural communities where access is especially limited.

Used responsibly, AI can help here too. Fine-tuned on culturally responsive and trauma-informed content and grounded in local resources, it can help our coaches personalize tone, read context, and surface the right resources. But that only works when the AI supports trained humans rather than operating on its own.

4. Sonar now supports more than 25,000 young people across nine states. Looking back, how did Headstream help you navigate the key inflection points in that growth?

Drew: Headstream came at an important time for Sonar. When we joined the Accelerator, we were moving from early pilots toward broader school-based deployment. We knew youth co-creation mattered, but Headstream helped us build more discipline around it. How to ask better questions, get more candid feedback, include a wider range of perspectives, and turn that feedback into real product and communications decisions. The Sonar Changemaker program came directly out of that.

It also helped us think more rigorously about go-to-market and impact. The Residency met us at the next inflection point, helping us move beyond a district-only strategy, pressure-test new channels, and sharpen our case for health systems and other institutional partners. That work helped open a pipeline of nearly a million dollars in signed ARR, with partnerships now live.

Looking back, Headstream was not just a program. It was a set of relationships and a forcing function that kept us listening to young people as we scaled. The community really feels like a family, and that is a big part of how Sonar grew into a platform now supporting thousands of young people across the country.

Beyond Access

Sonar's story reflects what becomes possible when founders building safe, effective, human-led solutions meet the right ecosystem of support.

It also reflects a larger shift. The youth mental health market is at an inflection point, and the path forward is not access alone. It is making sure that young people have access to support that is safe, culturally competent and clinically effective. Meeting the scale and urgency of youth mental health demand takes more than any single product. It takes models that expand and support the workforce, solutions that lower barriers to care and aligned capital that helps proven approaches reach more communities faster.

This is where ecosystem building becomes essential. Through youth co-creation, strategic mentorship and access to aligned capital, SecondMuse's Headstream program helps founders like Sonar refine their models, validate their assumptions and scale responsibly. To date, Headstream alumni have collectively raised over $242 million in follow-on funding to scale youth mental health solutions that have reached 51 million people. The mental health tech ecosystem is more mature, more trusted and more culturally competent than it was eight years ago, and Headstream is part of why.

The goal is a near-term future in which mental health care is as prioritized and accessible as physical health care, one that unburdens young people from constraints that limit their full participation in economic and civic life.

Building that future faster takes partners. If you're a funder, school district, or organization working to get proven solutions to the young people who need them, we’d love to build the ecosystem together. Connect with us here.

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About Sonar Mental Health

Sonar Mental Health (“Sonar”) helps health systems, pediatric care organizations, schools and community behavioral health providers strengthen and scale youth behavioral health support. Sonar provides 24/7 chat-based well-being coaching, triage, escalation and care navigation for young people, helping close the gap between when a need is identified and when care is received. Every conversation is led by a trained “Wellbeing Coach”. AI is used behind the scenes to support coach workflows, consistency, documentation, personalization and risk flagging. Users do not interact directly with AI. Sonar is designed to complement, not replace, therapy, licensed clinical care or emergency services. By extending support beyond scheduled visits, school hours and traditional care settings, Sonar helps partners keep youth supported, visible and connected to the right care pathways. Sonar is available to more than 25,000 young people across the US. Learn more at sonarmentalhealth.com.

About Headstream

Headstream, an innovation program by SecondMuse, exists to improve the mental well-being of adolescents, with a focus on systemically excluded communities, including BIPOC, Latino, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. Headstream reshapes how the health, education, and social tech systems prioritize youth mental health. Learn more about our programs at headstreaminnovation.com

About SecondMuse

SecondMuse is a leading innovation firm dedicated to creating economic value through market-driven solutions that generate lasting impact. We work with clients to fuel sustainable growth while delivering measurable benefits for businesses, communities, and the planet. For over 15 years, we have designed, developed, and implemented innovative programs and financial solutions that unlock new opportunities, expand access to capital, and drive economic transformation. Our work spans 190+ countries and territories. Learn more at secondmuse.com