Share
A serial entrepreneur built BridgeCare Technologies to help schools meet a mental health crisis the system isn’t staffed for.
Across the country, school counselors are being asked to do work the math doesn’t support. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends one counselor for every 250 students. In Michigan, the average is closer to 600.
Sunny Nadolsky has spent the last three years building a company designed to close that gap.
After exiting her second company, MediBookr—a healthcare transparency platform that contributed to federal legislation requiring hospitals and insurance providers to publish pricing in a machine-readable format—Nadolsky found herself increasingly drawn to bigger questions.
She had spent two decades working at the intersection of health and education technology, earning an MBA from Arizona State University and pursuing doctoral studies in organizational behavior at Michigan State University. She hadn’t planned on building another company, but a distressed call from a personal friend whose teenage daughter had attempted suicide changed everything.
“The conversation crystallized what I had been watching for years as an educator, school board member, and parent,” she said. “Schools are under enormous pressure to deliver on grades and test scores, while students’ mental health and well-being often fall through the cracks due to limited resources.”
The System Isn’t Built for the Demand
Looking closer, she found a system running on fumes. According to the most recent ASCA data, the national counselor-to-student ratio is 372 to 1. Nadolsky points to a shortage of roughly 100,000 counselors, meaning even districts with the budget to hire often cannot fill the role.
“Schools are working with a blanket that’s always too short,” she said. “The feet are out, the shoulders are out, and mental health is what keeps getting left out in the cold.”
She had the expertise, network, and resources from her previous ventures. She also had a question she couldn’t shake:
“If not me, then who?” she asked. “And if not now, then when?”
Building Human Support Around AI
Nadolsky founded BridgeCare Technologies about three years ago.
The platform gives students several ways to engage. Chat-based coaching is led by certified school counselors and life-skills coaches—not AI directly—a decision Nadolsky made early after parents and administrators raised concerns about students interacting with AI unsupervised.
Alongside the human-led support, students can access AI-powered tools for goal setting, academic and career guidance, and soft skills development covering areas like communication, emotional regulation, time management, and conflict resolution.
AI works in the background of the self-service tools, analyzing how students engage and adapting what comes next. A student exploring college or career pathways gets a different experience than one working through challenges with peers or academics.
“Student can come in and access any of the tools with personalized guidance,” Nadolsky said.
BridgeCare has now been serving school districts for two years, and the early outcome data is encouraging. Among students using the platform, 81 percent report improved mental wellness, 79 percent show academic improvement against their baseline at enrollment, and 57 percent return on their own to engage with the platform again.
More Than a Capital Investment
The connection to the MSU Research Foundation came through Exit Quotient Ventures (EQV), an early BridgeCare investor whose managing partners are MSU alumni. They introduced Nadolsky to the Foundation’s venture team, and BridgeCare was announced as a portfolio company in January 2026 alongside 32 other Michigan startups backed through the Foundation’s Red Cedar Ventures and Michigan Rise investment subsidiaries.
Nadolsky said the Foundation’s support quickly extended beyond capital, connecting her with Kalamazoo Forward Ventures, which brought deep relationships with Michigan school districts to the table.
Conversations with the Foundation’s leadership team also pushed Nadolsky to think beyond K-12 schools. College students face many of the same pressures, while campus counseling centers face the same staffing shortages. Expanding into higher education soon shifted from a possibility into an active growth strategy.
Nadolsky, who also mentors student startup teams as an Entrepreneur In Residence (EIR) at the MSU Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, describes the Foundation’s involvement as something that goes beyond a check and a handshake.
“It’s not only the capital,” she said. “It has this vast network nationally, the expertise from the leadership team, and a brand that carries real weight with other funds and potential partners.”
She also pointed to the Foundation’s events, including the Women of Innovation Summit she attended, as places where those connections become tangible.
“Academics, industry, innovation, funding,” she said. “A chair won’t stand without any one of those legs. The MSU Research Foundation does that exactly.”
BridgeCare is now in its third year, continuing to grow its district partnerships while expanding into higher education. Much of the team Nadolsky built followed her from her previous company, including her Chief Technology Officer Peter Sispoidis, who helped build the platform from the start.
The math hasn’t changed, but the students inside it now have somewhere to go.
For school districts rethinking how to support student mental wellness alongside academic outcomes, more information is available at bridgecare.me.
Written by Alana Lundgaard.
