Company leader
Alex Alvarado
Co-founder and CEO
Daybreak Health
Alex Alvarado is co-founder and chief executive of Daybreak Health, a San Francisco company that provides teletherapy to K-12 students through their school districts. Alvarado is trying to make sure no other teenager falls through the cracks the way his younger brother did, by putting licensed therapists within reach of students at school.
Growing Up in Seattle
Alvarado grew up in Seattle, Washington, the oldest of five children of two educators, who homeschooled all of them through middle school. He is half Mexican and grew up in a religious family, he told Crunchbase News in 2021. As a boy he wanted to be a pilot and spent hours on a flight simulator game.
Stanford and the Treasury Department
At Stanford University he double-majored in economics and public policy, which led him into healthcare policy and a few months at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. "I realized the politics weren't for me, but did enjoy the public service," he said. He then worked at a healthcare consultancy and at Jiff, an employee health benefits platform, where he met his future co-founder Luke Mercado.
His Brother's Crisis and the Start of Daybreak
The idea for Daybreak came when his younger brother reached a crisis after about 10 years of depression. "My first reaction was that I needed to be there with my brother and to unpack what we had all missed as a family," Alvarado told Crunchbase News. Over the next year he learned that many other families faced the same struggle to find care for a teenager.
In 2019 he founded Daybreak with Mercado and Siddarth Cidambi, whom he had met on his first day at Stanford. The company went through Y Combinator and raised a $1.8 million seed round led by Maven Ventures in 2021.
Taking Daybreak into School Districts
Daybreak moved from teen counseling into partnerships with school districts, which refer students and in many cases cover the cost. "We believe that every child, regardless of their background, should be able to access high-quality, personalized care," Alvarado said when Daybreak raised its $13 million Series B in 2023. In October 2026, FullBloom made a strategic investment in Daybreak, and Alvarado said the partnership with its CharacterStrong division would help "scale mental health support, getting students into care faster and keep them supported longer," according to the announcement.