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Kristin McGraner is founder and chief executive officer of Thrive Therapies Group, a tech-enabled pediatric healthcare company that delivers therapy, evaluations and behavioral health care to children with disabilities inside schools. Thrive serves more than 200 schools and districts across six states under multi-year contracts, and in 2026 raised $7.7 million led by LiveOak Ventures, with participation from Activate Venture Partners and the Charter School Growth Fund.
McGraner has approached this work from three directions. For eleven years she led a public school system, responsible for ensuring that diverse learners achieved academically and developed socially and emotionally, and for the outside services meant to support them. Before that she directed federally funded research on whether those services changed children’s outcomes. And she is a person with a lifelong hearing and speech disability, identified late in her own childhood. Across all three, the same problem appeared. No one could say precisely what a child needed early enough to act on it.
Thrive is built against that problem. The company employs its clinicians — speech-language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, school psychologists, nurses, and mental and behavioral health professionals — who work inside schools face-to-face with students, teachers and families, supported by Thrive Clinical, the company’s proprietary clinical intelligence platform, which also manages Medicaid revenue cycle for partner districts. More than 85 percent of students in Thrive school systems meet their annual IEP goals, and 46 percent meet their goals and no longer require services, against a national average near 8 percent. McGraner has built Thrive’s executive team, including a chief clinical officer, a chief product and technology officer, and national directors across clinical disciplines.
Before founding Thrive, McGraner spent eleven years as founder and CEO of STEM Preparatory Academy in Nashville, which she built into one of Tennessee’s highest-performing public school systems and the state’s strongest for multilingual learners. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes ranks STEM Prep among the highest-performing schools in the state, and the Tennessee Department of Education named it a Reward School.
Earlier, at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, McGraner directed federally funded research teams across four states studying how state and district policy shapes outcomes for students with diverse needs, managed multi-million-dollar federal research budgets, and advised state education agencies on translating research into practice. She testified before state legislatures on special education, workforce quality and accountability, and served as founding program director of the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching, a partnership with the U.S. Department of State. Across two decades she has operated under public accountability in every seat she has held — charter authorization and state academic reporting, federal research compliance, and the IDEA and Medicaid requirements that govern school-based care.
McGraner holds a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership and Policy from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. She has served on the boards of the BioTN Foundation, Equal Chance for Education and the Nashville Technology Council, chaired the board of Little Wonders Early Learning, which provides affordable childcare for educators, and sat on the Department of Education’s Career Forward Task Force.
She began her career teaching high school English and reading intervention for adolescents with significant learning challenges — students who, like her, had gone years without anyone identifying precisely what they needed.
