The autism therapy leadership of today blends born-and-bred industry veterans with corporate outsiders.
This mix reflects the industry’s youth and the acceleration of its development, driven by private equity. Without the time for a pipeline of leadership to develop organically, investors turned to business professionals from other slices of health care with no prior industry experience.
These conditions create a wide-open field for skilled, principled leaders to impact their organizations and the field.
Below, Behavioral Health Business profiles executives representing key elements of the industry’s top leadership. The following list tends toward leaders who, in addition to their business acumen, have experience as clinicians. Such experiences are irreplaceable and tie these leaders to clinical care that no amount of corporate education or leadership experience can. However, readers will notice that many of the leaders of the largest organizations in autism therapy are
Hersh Sanghavi, CEO of Action Behavior Centers
Action Behavior Centers is the goliath of the industry: no competitor comes close to rivaling its footprint. The company presently lists 403 in-home and center-based service locations, plus 14 ABA Academies for school-aged children.
The company operates in only nine states. The company has grown quickly; it operated about 65 locations in Texas about four years ago.
CEO Hersh Sanghavi was named CEO in June 2020. He has overseen much of this growth. As the company approaches its fourth year under Charlesbank Capital Partners, his next moves will be compelling. Sanghavi’s tenure already includes a transition from NexPhase Capital to Charlesbank; given his track record, a similar exit or transition seems likely. He might also continue his role after Charlesbank’s exit. He made that transition once. He could do it again.
Action Behavior Centers is one of the few large autism therapy organizations that has seen sustained expansion of their footprint over the last few years. Many have stumbled as market conditions at the state level shifted. The company faces a similar change as Medicaid managed care companies in Arizona reassess their autism therapy expenses. Most recently, the Arizona UnitedHealthcare entity delivered coverage termination notices to families receiving care from Action Behavior Centers, according to local media reports.
Sanghavi’s company is in the thick of the defining moment and likely state of play for the industry moving forward. This, combined with the gargantuan scale of his company, makes him a prime executive to watch.
Jeff Beck, CEO and co-founder of AnswersNow
AnswersNow’s all-BCBA, parent-focused, telehealth model is a countercultural reaction to the historic model of corporatized autism therapy. This against-the-grain approach to care and a tech-forward model have proven to be a winner on several fronts — including with investors.
Most recently, the company secured a $40 million Series B funding round led by HealthQuest Capital. Capital raises for founder-led companies hinge in large part on the ability of said founder-executive to marshal considerable charisma and vision. Jeff Beck, co-founder and CEO of AnswersNow, must be given credit for the company’s expansion efforts using a highly differentiated model.
Beck came to the corner office and the entrepreneurial world as a social worker, one of the few clinicians to hold the CEO spot in this space. With a big check in hand, it will be notable to see what approach the company takes to scaling up its model. It will also be revealing to see how a wider population of prospective payers and patients respond to what the company is offering over the next few years. If he and AnswerNow find resounding success, many newcomers and even incumbents may seek to copy his work.
Mandy Ralston, CEO of KidsChoice Therapy and Play Center
Mandy Ralston’s background in repeat autism therapy entrepreneurship, corporate leadership and advocacy stands apart from many of the executives who are brought in to lead private equity platform plays.
But then again, few private equity firms can bill themselves as women-owned, as is the case with New York City-based Aquitaine Capital. The firm announced in late January that it had backed Oklahoma City-based KidsChoice Therapy and Play Center and appointed Ralston as its CEO. She had previously been the CEO of The Centre for Neurodiversity Innovation (CNDI) and the CEO and founder of Nonbinary Solutions.
“What makes this chapter especially exciting is our new partnership with Aquitaine Capital, a women-owned private equity firm that is backing thoughtful growth, not just fast growth,” Ralston said on LinkedIn. “Their investment brings capital, operating resources, and a deep health care network to help KidsChoice strengthen clinical quality, infrastructure, and the day-to-day supports that help both clinicians and families thrive.”
It will be enlightening to see what “thoughtful growth” looks like under the multispecialty model developed by KidsChoice Therapy and Play Center in Oklahoma. Ralston is one of an increasing number of autism therapy companies that seek to make the next chapter of autism therapy more clinically expansive than the ABA-centered legacy of the industry.
Cathy Ryu, ex-COO of Cortica
Speaking of multispecialty care…
Cortica’s clinical model integrates more medical services alongside behavioral health services than any other organization in the industry. Its founders wanted to bring an approach akin to the academic health system model to autism therapy and neurodivergent services.
But bringing all of these specialties together can create logistical headaches for organizations. Unless appropriately planned, coordinated and tracked, promising one-stop-shop models can become something even less than the sum of their parts.
Cathy Ryu served as Cortica’s chief operating officer for the last three years. She recently stepped away from the organization, according to her LinkedIn profile. Ryu started at the company in 2019 as a center director and rose through the company’s ranks, holding the roles of regional operations head and senior vice president of operations.
Ryu started out as a pediatric physical therapist. One can assume that her experience providing services in a field that the autism therapy industry is increasingly trying to fold into clinical models provides her with invaluable insights.
The industry is still new enough that there isn’t a clear pipeline of executive talent, let alone executive talent with clinical experience, that can handle the operations of a complicated and expanding company. She may have her pick of providers to go to.
Brett Blevins, founder and former CEO of Commonwealth ABA
Brett Blevins is a serial entrepreneur in the behavioral health space. That makes him part of a small but remarkably impactful corps of executives in this space. His most recent major exploit was the sale of Commonwealth ABA to Charlotte, North Carolina-based Already Autism Health, a platform backed by Triton Pacific Healthcare Partners. That deal was announced in January 2025. Blevins founded Commonwealth ABA in 2023.
Blevins stayed on with the company as chief administrative officer for a little less than a year and worked on integrating his company, Already Autism Health and C.A.B.S Autism & Behaviour Specialists — a company whose acquisition was announced just days after the Commonwealth ABA deal.
After a few months of unplugging at the end of 2025, Blevins is back at it with several concurrent efforts. He runs a consultancy called Behavioral Wealth and Finance to help BCBAs with personal finance questions, including those who own their clinics. He consults medium-sized autism therapy organizations. He also co-founded an ABA company in Utah, where he has an ownership stake and the role of board advisor and chairman, which is in its earliest stages.
Additionally, he is a clinician — a BCBA with a background in special education.
It will be telling what someone who has worked at nearly every level of this industry will do after a successful exit and re-entry at a turbulent time for the industry.
Yagnesh Vadgama, ex-Magellan Health turned CentralReach executive
Yagnesh Vadgama has held leadership roles across every major constituency of autism therapy.
A BCBA in education and practice, Vadgama has spent the last 11 years or so working at managed behavioral health care organizations, mostly Magellan Health. Now he is stepping into an executive role at CentralReach, the largest software provider for the autism therapy industry.
The to-be-publicly-announced transition took place earlier in the year. This move represents a significant change in the trajectory of a career previously centered on care provision and coverage. Now at CentralReach, the perspective shifts to the enablement of care and a more earnest treatment of autism therapy providers as clients.
While the impact of such an appointment remains to be seen, the perspectives of an executive with wide-ranging experience could go a long way in helping a major portion of the autism therapy industry bridge operational and technical gaps between payers and providers.
He also joins the company during a period of transition for CentralReach. The company was acquired by Roper Technologies (Nasdaq:ROP) in April 2025 for $1.85 billion. Vadgama has a rare opportunity to positively impact in an industry that is still sorting out how tech can best serve the interests of providers and families.
William Abbott, CEO of BlueSprig Pediatrics
BlueSprig Pediatrics is one of the largest providers of autism therapy in the U.S., with 155 locations listed on its website. It’s also one that’s known for its acquisitive behavior, having taken on Florida Autism Center and Trumpet Behavioral Health.
The company named William Abbott as CEO in March of 2025, following a prolonged period of interim leadership.
Abbott is unique because of his background with health plans and their entities and venture capital-backed physical health care companies. Abbott and CEOs like him that were pulled in from other segments of health — Acorn Health’s Mony Iyer and Lighthouse Autism Center’s Joseph Giles — come with the sheen of corporate competence but have no expertise in the field and may find their preconceptions about the health care industry troublesome relative to the unique and extremely personal nature of autism therapy. Iyer and Giles come from veterinary medicine and ophthalmology, respectively.
Most recently, he was the CEO of InnovaCare Health, a value-based care-focused health care company that operates about 40 clinics and manages the care of about 100,000 people. This experience may be invaluable in establishing value-based care and similar reimbursement strategies at a provider organization of note. He also previously worked at Carbon Health, which recently filed for bankruptcy, and CVS Caremark.
Value-based care is a long-sought and often underdeveloped concept in behavioral health. One key reason is that health plans struggle to attribute value for behavioral health services when savings are likely to appear in the patient population’s physical health care spend.
Autism therapy is a relatively sudden and acute source of increased spending for health plans. An executive with experience managing care in a value-based care context would be invaluable at the moment. However, there is a nascent but growing consensus on establishing care outcome standards for what many in the industry describe as a highly heterogeneous patient population. Any one executive’s experience would likely be frustrated by the lack of clarity on establishing the basis for value.
That said, Abbott and BlueSprig might have an ideal partner in steering payment trends in autism therapy — its financial backer, KKR.
KKR launched BlueSprig in late 2017. The investment and financial titan has exceeded the typical hold periods for this industry, indicating a clear interest in fine-tuning BlueSprig before releasing it. What’s more, it apparently took its time to find the right executive that it thinks can shepherd the company to whatever future it’s planning. That kind of patience is often what is missing in most investor-backed health care plays. This is a rare asset for Abbott to leverage.