When entrepreneur Vlad Gheorgiou began experiencing anxiety attacks and panic attacks at work, he was fortunate to be able to access mental health support through a family connection. Sharing his story with friends and colleagues, he quickly realised that many people were suffering similar problems due to workplace stress; moreover, while some employers were supportive, few were doing anything to address the underlying issues causing the difficulties.
That experience was the inspiration for Kyan Health, the Zurich-based start-up that Gheorgiou founded with colleagues Konstantin Struck and Ignacio Leonhardt in 2021. Today, the company is announcing the successful completion of a $12.7 million Series A round that takes the total funding raised by the company to $18.5 million.
“Many organisations are now very vocal about mental health and wellbeing, but most are not doing enough to make their workplaces safer,” Gheorgiou explains. “We’ve done a brilliant job of protecting people’s physical health through health and safety improvements, but we haven’t tackled mental health in the same way yet.”
Kyan Health aims to meet the challenge head on, selling its technology-driven solution to a growing number of enterprises.
Each time it acquires a new client, employees at the organisation are asked to complete a confidential questionnaire, sharing their views about what they’re happy and unhappy with, what causes them stress and what their current anxieties may be. The questionnaires can be used to direct individual employees towards help and support, if that’s what is needed, but critically, the answers also enable Kyan Health to assess where risk is present in the organisation. It may be that people in certain roles or departments are feeling particularly anxious, for example. It may be that certain policies and practices are causing stress. There may be cultural issues or behavioural problems driving disquiet.
Using this analysis Kyan Health is able to make recommendations to the organisation about how it can eradicate these problems – how, effectively, it can make its workplace safer. Perhaps certain managers need more guidance on how to communicate more openly. Maybe certain practices need to be rethought. The company can also deliver relevant solutions – training courses, for example – to turn its recommendations into reality.
The goal is to ensure employees have access to help when they need it but also that the risk of staff developing further problems in the future is reduced. “When I struggled personally, I saw firsthand how inadequate the tools were to address real challenges,” says Gheorgiou. “This is about changing that – creating the tools I wish had existed, making mental health measurable, and giving organisations the power to act before crises hit.”
Kyan Health’s novel approach to mental health has already seen it pick up a number of high-profile clients. They include large enterprises such as Hitachi Energy, Deutsche Börse Group and Hilti, but also a number of smaller, high-growth companies such as On, Kuoni Tumlare and Board International, which are determined to build better mental health and wellbeing practices into their businesses at an earlier stage of development.
Kyan Health’s business model is built on subscriptions, with organisations signing up to use its platform on an ongoing basis. Gheorgiou believes the returns on investment that the company can offer are sizeable, given the scope to drive greater productivity through reduced absenteeism and presenteeism, and to boost staff retention if mental health problems can be reduced.
Some customers are already seeing those gains. The Swiss sportswear company On, for example, estimates that Kyan Health’s program has delivered an annual return on investment of 11.6% a year over the past two years, the equivalent of $2.9 million of value – so far, around 50% of the business’s 2,500 or so employees have engaged with the program.
Hitachi Energy, a business that employs 40,000 people, also reports impressive results. “Kyan is the only provider that truly supports the organisational and individual angle at the same time,” says Achim Braun, the company’s chief human resources officer.
Such successes have underpinned a series of funding rounds for Kyan Health, beginning with a $1.7 million pre-seed round led by Wingman Ventures in 2021 and then a $4 million seed round led by Amplo Ventures in 2022. Today’s $12.7 million Series A round is led by Swisscom Ventures with participation from GreyMatter Capital, naturalX Health Ventures, Founderful, Joyance Partners and several angel investors.
Victoria Lietha, investment director at Swisscom Ventures, says: “Kyan Health is transforming how businesses support mental health and well-being by providing predictive, scalable solutions that address the needs of global enterprises.”
The company intends to use the proceeds of the Series A round to fund further product development. In particular, Gheorgiou is keen to improve Kyan Health’s predictive analytics capabilities, so that the company can make more use of data to warn its enterprise customers about future issues they could face at a much earlier stage. “We can use our insight to ensure those issues are tackled before they cause problems,” he says.
