Stephanie Papes

Stephanie Papes is the Founder & CEO of Boulder, a telehealth company pioneering opioid recovery through medication-based treatment and patient care via video/messaging chats in a secure smartphone app. Boulder’s digital care approach is able to rapidly address the massive scale of the US opioid crisis in a way that traditional brick & mortar clinics simply cannot.
Prior to founding Boulder, Stephanie helped lead healthcare services and technology investing strategy at Apple Tree Partners, a venture capital fund with $3B under management. While there, Apple Tree invested in a large addiction treatment group with outpatient clinics across Massachusetts, one which amassed a 500 person waitlist by its first day of opening. Stephanie joined the board and spent time in the clinics, learning two crucial things:
1) Medication like buprenorphine can cut overdose mortality rates in half. Yet 65% of Americans who could benefit from this medication never receive it, because there aren’t addiction specialists to prescribe it in their communities.
2) Despite the clinic’s aggressive plans to expand to dozens of sites, it would still reach just a fraction of those who need treatment.
Feeling a sense of urgency and injustice to scale treatment to all Americans across the country who were desperately seeking it, Stephanie founded Boulder Care in 2017.
Stephanie brought Boulder to market in May 2019, having raised nearly $15 million in funding by leading investors, including First Round Capital and Greycroft. Boulder Care is partnered with insurers like Premera Blue Cross which, in April 2020, announced expansion of Boulder to more than 2 million members across the Northwest. Committed to payment reform in the healthcare industry, Boulder works with insurers on value-based contracts that measure success based on patient outcomes rather than volume of procedures.