The Accelerator

Ting Gao’s mission is personal. The co-founder of Lenny Learning grew up with a brother who faced serious mental health challenges. His teachers didn’t know how to support him — and they were not alone. Nine in 10 teachers feel unprepared to address student behavioral health. The implication? Students in the classroom aren’t always getting the help they need.

Along with fellow Yale grad Bryce Bjork, Ting launched AI-powered nonprofit Lenny Learning to fill the gap. The platform empowers educators with tailored lesson plans (thanks to AI) that address their classrooms’ specific mental health needs. Lenny Learning has scaled 4X in the months following the Fast Forward Accelerator in 2024. They credit the program for supporting their rebranding and financial growth that has allowed them to catapult Lenny into a tool used nationwide. Now, teachers are walking into the classroom with confidence, so students step out into the world with confidence too.

Jared Walker didn’t mean to start Dollar For. After his family faced a medical crisis, they were left with a question too many Americans have asked: "How do we pay for this?" Jared stumbled upon charity care, a little-known policy that wipes out medical debt for low-income patients. He shared it on TikTok, and the video exploded — thousands of DMs rolled in from people desperate for help. Seeing the need, Jared launched Dollar For to meet the moment and make debt relief simple.

When Jared joined the Accelerator, he had never led an organization — but he did have a Google Form, a big dream, and a whole lot of gumption. He credits the program for helping Dollar For move from startup to grownup. Today, Dollar For’s tech has helped relieve over $60M in medical debt, meaningfully changing lives across the U.S.

Kiah Williams saw a crisis: too many people couldn’t afford the medication they needed. Determined to fix it, she co-founded SIRUM. SIRUM redistributes unused medicine to patients in need. It’s a smart solution to a huge, solvable problem.

SIRUM wasn’t always the nation’s largest redistributor of surplus medicine. They joined Fast Forward’s first-ever Accelerator cohort in 2014 when they were just getting started. In the decade that followed, they changed the landscape of medicine redistribution. They’ve received the Audacious Prize, which fueled the nonprofit to provide over 2.3M prescriptions to those who need them, and expand their work into 10 states. Their story is proof that innovation can save lives.

Idris Brewster grew up in the spotlight — literally. His parents, both filmmakers, documented his life as a Black student in a predominantly white school. Multimedia storytelling has been a part of his life from the start. So it's no surprise he co-founded Kinfolk, an archival platform that uses augmented reality (AR) to illuminate the often overlooked histories of Black, Brown, and Queer communities. Kinfolk creates digital, AR monuments that bring these powerful stories to life in public spaces.

Before Fast Forward, Kinfolk was a scrappy collective, bringing their AR prototypes to rallies, art galleries, and community meetings across NYC. Now, their monuments are transforming cities around the United States — for a fraction of the cost of taking down racist monuments. Kinfolk’s virtual landmarks have been featured in New York's MOMA, on Netflix, and in six cities. Thanks to Idris’s tech-driven storytelling, the world — both digital and physical — is giving these untold stories the spotlight they deserve.

Koko started as Rob Morris's side project at MIT. He hacked it together to manage his own well-being. While he sought mental health support, he learned to code on Stack Overflow. He wondered: could an approach similar to Stack’s open-source model apply to mental health? Rob ran an RCT, built a prototype, and Koko was born. Koko detects signs of distress on social media using AI, and provides real-time, evidence-based interventions for users in need.

Today, Koko has worked with TikTok and Pinterest, clinical advisors from institutions like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, and has impacted 5M+ young people. Koko is flipping the script on social media. It’s reaching young people on the platforms they use every day to help them feel…better.