Sol Health Is Showing Gen Z A New Way To Get Therapy

A young person can decide they are finally ready for therapy and still spend months trying to find someone affordable. Gun Young Lim knows that frustration personally, and it became part of the reason he co-founded Sol Health, a mental health startup built around a simple idea: care should not be available only to people who can pay hundreds of dollars per session.

“I thought the hard part would be admitting I needed help,” Lim said. “Then I realized the harder part was finding help I could actually reach.”

Sol Health now operates in more than 25 states, including New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, and California. The platform gives clients three ways to access therapy: free fully funded sessions through Sol Sessions, its community care program for nonprofits, schools, and labor organizations; $30 cash-pay sessions; or in-network sessions through insurance. Every session is delivered by the same workforce, therapists-in-training, and associate therapists who are accruing supervised clinical hours on the path to full licensure.

For Lim, that workforce is not a backup plan. It is the point.

“People hear therapist-in-training and assume they are getting something less,” Lim said. “My experience was the opposite. The therapist who changed my life was still training.”

That experience started years before Sol Health existed. Lim left Korea at 13 on a scholarship to a boarding school in the United Kingdom. He saw the move as an opportunity, but the reality was harder than he expected. Homesickness became loneliness, and loneliness became anxiety. At that age, he did not talk about mental health. He did not believe anyone would really understand what it felt like to be halfway around the world from home, and so he kept his struggles hidden.

At Stanford, that began to change. Lim watched friends seek therapy and eventually found the courage to do the same. But wanting care did not mean care was easy to find. He spent months searching for a therapist he could afford or one who took his insurance.

The person he finally found was a graduate therapist intern still working toward her master’s degree.“She was the only option I could actually access,” Lim said. “But she was also the right person for me in a way I did not expect.”

His therapist had an international student background and Korean heritage. She understood diaspora, family expectations, distance from home, and the emotional weight that can come with moving across cultures at a young age. Lim said the connection worked not only because of clinical training but also because there was lived experience beneath the conversation.

“She understood things I did not have to over-explain,” Lim said. “That made therapy feel possible for me.”

That moment changed how Lim thought about the entire system. It was not only that a therapist-in-training had been the most accessible option. She had been the right one — and the reason had everything to do with who she was. As a graduate intern entering the field, she belonged to the newest generation of clinicians, one more diverse in background, identity, and lived experience than the licensed workforce that came before.That pattern was not a coincidence.

The pre-licensed workforce reflects who is entering the profession today, not who entered it decades ago. For Gen Z clients searching for someone who understands their culture, immigrant family dynamics, queer identity, neurodivergence, or the specific texture of growing up online, that workforce is one of the most direct paths to a real match.

"That match wasn't an accident," Lim said. "Therapists-in-training are the newest generation entering the field. They reflect who is actually seeking care today."That insight became the foundation of Sol Health. Lim wanted every client to find their version of the therapist he had found — someone who had been in their shoes and could understand without an over-explanation.

Two problems sat side by side. Gen Z was seeking mental health care at unprecedented levels, but traditional therapy was too expensive, too slow, or too disconnected from what younger clients wanted. Therapists-in-training, meanwhile, were struggling through a pathway that gave them too little hours, structure, and support.

Lim co-founded Sol Health during his senior year at Stanford with Melinda Gong, now the company’s co-founder and COO. They started by partnering with a handful of graduate programs, hosting students for their counseling internships, and connecting them with Gen Z clients. The model grew from there.T

oday, Sol Health has trained and supervised more than 300 graduate therapist interns and more than 60 associate therapists. It has provided more than 30,000 therapy sessions, including more than 1,500 fully funded sessions through Sol Sessions. The company has also partnered with more than 100 graduate mental health counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy programs across the U.S.

Lim believes part of Sol Health’s appeal for younger clients comes from the clinicians themselves. Therapists-in-training are often part of the newest generation entering the field, which can make the workforce more diverse and more reflective of the people seeking care.“Gen Z is not just asking for faster therapy,” Lim said.

“They want someone who understands their background, language, culture, identity, and the world they are actually living in.”

That does not mean Sol Health treats training as informal. Lim said clinicians are supervised by licensed senior clinicians, follow evidence-based protocols, and track outcomes through validated measures such as GAD-7 for anxiety, PHQ-9 for depression. and BR-WAI for therapeutic alliance. He believes supervised care should be treated as part of the mental health infrastructure, the same way medical training relies on residents and fellows.

“In every other part of healthcare, we understand that supervised clinicians can deliver care while they are being trained,” Lim said. “Mental health is the field where we act like every provider should arrive fully formed.”

Sol Health also addresses a practical problem that many young people understand immediately: wait time. The company offers same-day appointments and typically gets clients into a first session within three days. For someone who has already spent months searching, that difference can matter.

“Speed matters when someone finally decides they are ready,” Lim said. “You do not want the system to tell them to come back in six weeks.”

Lim’s work has gained recognition beyond the company’s client base. Sol Health participated in the 2025 Headstream Accelerator, and Lim won the 2024 Young Innovators in Behavioral Health award. The company has also raised investment from VC backers as it prepares to expand into additional states and launch post-licensure infrastructure designed to keep clinicians in the Sol Health ecosystem after they become fully licensed.

You can read up on Gun Young Lim on the Sol Health website.

For Lim, the long-term vision is straightforward. He wants mental health care to become normal, reachable, and culturally relevant for the generation that is asking for it most openly.

“The honest goal is that a 22-year-old should be able to walk into therapy within a week with someone who just ‘gets’ them,” Lim said.

“And it should cost less than their phone bill.”For the young person who has already decided they need help, that difference is not theoretical. It may be the difference between waiting, giving up, or finally sitting across from someone who gets it.