UHS Buying Talkspace to Boost Virtual Behavioral Lineup
Universal Health Services Inc. leaders have agreed to buy fellow public company Talkspace Inc. for about $835 million in a move to expand its behavioral healthcare offerings into virtual services.
New York City-based Talkspace last year hosted more than 1.6 million therapy and psychiatry sessions through its network of about 6,000 licensed professionals active in all 50 states as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The company produced a net profit of $7.8 million on $229 million in revenue in 2025 as CEO Jon Cohen and his team kept a relative lid on expense growth while revenues rose 22 percent.
Cohen recently told investors he expects that Talkspace’s adjusted EBITDA should climb to between $30 million and $35 million in 2026 after more than doubling to $15.8 million last year. Revenues are forecast to grow to somewhere between $275 million and $290 million.
Speaking at the Leerink Global Healthcare Conference shortly after the planned acquisition was announced, UHS CFO Steve Filton said adding Talkspace—which is available to more than 200 million through health insurance plans or similar employer benefits—to the company’s lineup will grow behavioral care revenues by about 3.5 percent and said the opportunities arising from the combination of the two companies “are mostly revenue-driven.”
Filton said that Cohen and his team told their UHS counterparts during deal talks that many of Talkspace’s therapists—the majority of whom are independent contractors—can take on more patients if given the chance. From UHS’ perspective, a key growth strategy with Talkspace will be to offer a wide range of services to patients after they have been discharged from an inpatient stay.
“Some of the challenges in meeting that demand is sometimes the patients don’t want to continue to receive that demand on our campus. They live far away, […] they’re traveling,” Filton said. “So now we have this virtual option that we’ll be able to offer and I think that’s a real benefit. In the case of some of our patient population, particularly the adolescent or […] teenage population, that’s a population that I think is really drawn to virtual care. In many cases, I think they prefer that.”
UHS’ planned purchase of Talkspace is expected to close in the third quarter and begin adding slightly to UHS’ profits in the first year under the company’s umbrella. Word of the plan to buy Talkspace comes as UHS leaders are paying more attention to building out an outpatient behavioral footprint via both its health systems’ brands and the company’s Thousand Branches Wellness division. Those plans call for UHS to open about 10 locations per year for the foreseeable future.
Shares of UHS (Ticker: UHS) dipped more than 2 percent to about $187 on the Talkspace news March 9. They’re essentially unchanged from six months ago, leaving the company’s market capitalization at about $11.4 billion.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post for more than a decade and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.