AI-native telemedicine clinic for addiction
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2024 | Employees: 15 | Stage: Seed (Y Combinator S26) | Website: https://sunflowerclinic.com/
Sunflower is building an AI-first telemedicine clinic for addiction on top of a consumer sobriety brand. The consumer product, Sunflower Sober, is built around an AI sponsor named Sam — reportedly the first AI sponsor for addiction — which reached roughly 100 monthly active users within six months, drove about $1.5M in yearly subscription revenue and has exchanged more than 7,000,000 messages with users. The company reports supporting over 21,500,000 days of sobriety and pacing toward 800,000+ new users a year, and cites survey data in which nearly 80% of users at day 60 said Sunflower prevented at least one relapse. The clinical arm, the Sunflower Clinic of Addiction Medicine, is a telemedicine outpatient programme for substance use disorders that accepts Medicaid. It is live in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where it holds facility licences and state Medicaid approval, and is in the final stages of contracting with county-level health plans — a licensing load Sunflower describes as harder than putting rockets into space. Those contracts are how it reaches Medicaid's more than $30 billion a year of addiction spending, and the case rests on affordability: many users cannot pay $125 an hour for therapy or $350 a quarter for medication. Founded in 2024 in San Francisco by Koby Conrad, a YC S19 alum who previously led growth at Rupa from $5M to $75M a year, with clinical leadership drawn from the Mayo Clinic and Charlie Health.
Sunflower is attacking a problem where licensing and getting paid matter far more than how good the AI is. The consumer side already works: an AI sobriety coach called Sam has handled more than 7 million messages and built a brand that reportedly added over 800,000 new users a year, with about $1.5M in yearly subscription revenue. The clinic is the real bet and the harder half. Getting paid by Medicaid means state approvals, county health plan contracts and a physical facility in every state, and being live in only Michigan and Pennsylvania shows how early it is. The honest read is that the AI brings people in, while the money comes from paid clinical care — a services business with modest margins and heavy paperwork.
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