Chuck Divita isn’t declaring victory by any means. But the Teladoc Health Inc. CEO’s initiative to grow the virtual care provider’s BetterHelp mental health division by bringing in members covered by insurance is gaining traction.

At the end of last April, New York-based Teladoc paid nearly $30 million for UpLift Technologies Inc., which had in five years assembled a network of more than 1,500 providers and insurance relationships covering more than 100 million lives. Divita and his team said then they aimed to combine Uplift’s success with Teladoc’s investment in operations and technology to scale up BetterHelp’s ranks of customers covered by insurance. That should over time stem the decline in BetterHelp’s customer base, which shrank by 25,000 last year to 375,000.

“We have seen that user growth be negative for a little bit,” Divita said on March 10 at the 28th Annual Global Healthcare Conference. “As we grow insurance, we expect to cross that at some point where we see the overall users, whether they’re consumer of insurance, stabilize and grow. We would need to see more results from what we’re doing but we like what we’re seeing so far.”

In terms of numbers, UpLift delivered $13 million in revenues from May 1 of last year until Dec. 31, an annual rate of nearly $20 million compared to about $15 million in 2024. For 2026, Divita recently told investors he expects Teladoc to grow sales to insurance-covered members to grow to between $75 million and $90 million as UpLift scales up further and BetterHelp enters new states and recruits more providers. By year’s end, the initiative should be on an annual revenue pace of $100 million, a decent chunk of BetterHelp’s revenue, which totaled $950 million in 2025.

“As we roll out new markets, as we have more sessions, more users on the platform for longer, we’re seeing that play out in the data and that’s what gives us confidence in the ramp,” Divita said during Teladoc’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call late last month. “Not only based on state rollout but also based on utilization and access and awareness. And of course, we’re always continuing to add payer contracts as well.”

Growing its insurance-covered customer base will initially lower BetterHelp’s margins versus the direct-pay model of its direct-to-consumer business. But having members covered by benefits significantly lowers a provider’s marketing costs over time and Teladoc’s leaders have been trimming advertising spending in recent quarters.

That dynamic was a prominent reason behind a late-February upgrade of Teladoc shares by Bank of America analysts Allen Lutz. In recommending to clients that the buy Teladoc stock, Lutz said that if BetterHelp can convert more than half of its revenues to insurance-covered patients by 2028, its value could grow to be more than all of Teladoc today.

In making that calculation, Lutz pointed to the profitability of BetterHelp peer Talkspace Inc., which this week announced it is preparing to be acquired for more than $800 million by Universal Health Services Inc. Speaking at the Barclays gathering, Divita called that planned transaction a validation of what he’s trying to do with BetterHelp.

Shares of Teladoc (Ticker: TDOC) were up more than 5 percent to $5.59 in late trading on March 10. They are, however, still down about 25 percent over the past six months, a slid that has cut the company’s market capitalization to $1 billion.