While companies try to do the right thing by putting mental health support in place, often at great expense, the reality is just 5% – 1-in-20 – of Australian workers use Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs).
Knowing that means a lot of people fall through the cracks led Melbourne founders Ash Horovitz and Dean Rotenberg to create the mental wellbeing app mynd.
The Melbourne duo kicked off in 2023 and spent two years developing mynd to support people in real moments of need.
The app soft launched in 2025, offering personalised emotional check-ins and evidence-based therapeutic tools to help users regulate emotions, reduce stress and build everyday resilience. mynd is already achieving 40% workforce adoption in the organisations using it. It sits alongside existing support as the high-engagement, preventative layer that employees actually turn to before they reach crisis point.
Horovitz, who combines her psychology training with expertise in product development and human-centred design, said mynd is not a crisis line and replacement for therapy, but the missing middle in workplace mental health people actually use, turning mental health from a last-resort crisis call into an everyday habit.
“We built mynd because we have lived the gaps ourselves. The wait between therapy sessions can feel long. The moment at 2am when you do not know what to do is real,” she said.
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“Mental health support should not only exist in crisis. It should exist in everyday moments. mynd meets people where they are, not in a one-size-fits-all solution.”
Users tell mynd how they are feeling in a simple emotional check-in, and are matched in real time to short, evidence-based tools drawn from multiple therapeutic approaches, including breathwork, journalling, grounding, movement, meditation and more.
Sessions start at just a couple of minutes and are available 24/7 on any device, to ensure support is there in the moments it is needed most.
While it’s all confidential employers can get anonymised team insights about emerging psychosocial risks before they escalate into burnout, absenteeism or compliance concerns.
Removing a ‘big, scary step’
Premiership-winning former AFL forward and mental health advocate Tom Boyd, who retired aged just 23 due to severe anxiety and clinical depression, which he wrote about in his memoir Nowhere to Hide is a fan of mynd.
” As someone who has lived the pressure of elite performance and the challenges that come with that, I know how hard it is to ask for help,” he said.
“What I love about mynd is that it removes the big, scary step and replaces it with small, practical moments of support that people can actually use in real life.”
Adriarna Nunn, the head of people and culture at Victorian construction firm Cobild, has also seen the difference mynd can make in a sector with some of the country’s highest suicide and depression occurrences.
“We chose to align with mynd because construction is relentless and we can see the weight our Cobildians carry every day, on site and in the office,” she said.
“We do not pretend to have all the answers when it comes to mental health, but we do know it is our responsibility to create access, reduce stigma and open the door to real support. mynd allows us to be the vessel, not the expert, caring about our people as humans first, and showing that their wellbeing matters just as much as the buildings we deliver.”
Working alongside Horovitz and Rotenberg to build mynd is Rachel Harker, a clinical psychologist with over a decade of specialised experience in youth mental health, including as clinical lead at headspace, as well as Danny Ritterman as chief technology officer.
More at myndapp.com.au
