As awareness around mental health grows, what are the biggest gaps you see in the current emotional wellbeing ecosystem, and how can technology help bridge them without replacing human intervention?
The biggest gap is the space between sessions. You see someone for an hour, and then they are on their own for the 167 hours until the next one. Life does not break down on a schedule. The second gap is the front door. Stigma and cost mean most people never walk through it at all.
Well-designed technology can help with exactly those two gaps. An always-on companion can be there at 2am, in your own language, with no waitlist and no judgment. That answers the front-door problem and the between-sessions problem at the same time. But the moment you ask it to be the therapist, you have broken it. The job of technology here is to extend human care, never to imitate it. It should carry people toward a human, not stand in for one. Get that boundary right and technology can become one of the most powerful allies clinical care has had. Get it wrong and you have built something dangerous.
Many organisations are investing in employee wellbeing programmes, yet engagement often remains low. What needs to change to make wellbeing initiatives more impactful and sustainable?
Most workplace wellbeing is built for crisis, but crisis is not where most emotional strain begins. You hand someone a helpline number for the worst day of their life, then act surprised when they do not use it on a normal Tuesday. The tools sit unused because they are designed for the exception instead of the everyday.
What has to change is the frequency of the relationship. Wellbeing cannot be a glovebox item you reach for in an emergency. It has to be something people touch lightly and often. A quick check-in. A hard conversation processed on the commute home. A small thing worked through before it grows into a big one. The second thing that has to change is continuity. Today every contact starts from zero. When the support remembers you and builds on each conversation, you get a relationship instead of a transaction. Engagement is not a marketing problem. It is a design problem. Build something worth using before things fall apart, and people use it.
AI is increasingly being used in healthcare and wellness. What safeguards should companies put in place to ensure trust, privacy and ethical use of AI in emotionally sensitive interactions?
In this category, trust is not a feature. It is the entire product. A few things we treat as non-negotiable. Be radically clear about privacy. Conversations should be private by default, protected by strong security, and governed by clear rules about who can access content and when, including the one exception, which is safety. Never let the AI pretend to be a human or a clinician. People deserve to know what they are talking to. Let clinicians, not engineers, design the safety boundaries. Where the AI stops, how risk gets recognised, when a real person steps in. The moment something looks like genuine risk, the product has to move out of self-service mode and into a clear safety pathway, with human escalation built in rather than bolted on.
One more is easy to skip, and it matters most. Purpose. The ethical test for any company here is simple. Are you trying to resolve someone’s pain, or to maximise their time on your app? Those two goals pull in opposite directions. Optimise for engagement in mental health and you will eventually do harm. We measure ourselves on whether people leave better, not on whether they stay longer.
India’s healthcare infrastructure has expanded significantly over the years. Do you believe emotional wellbeing requires a dedicated infrastructure of its own, and what would such an ecosystem look like?
Yes, and that is the whole point. We built physical health infrastructure over decades. Hospitals, diagnostics, supply chains, insurance. Emotional wellbeing got almost none of it. We treated it as something you tough out, or, if you are lucky and wealthy, pay a specialist for in private. That is not an infrastructure. It is a gap with a few heroes working inside it.
A real one has three layers. A base layer that is always on and reaches everyone, in their own language, affordably. That is where technology does the heavy lifting. Above it, a connected continuum of human care. Coaches, counselors, clinicians, with a person’s context carried through so they never start over and re-tell their story to every new face. Underneath all of it, safety and privacy as standards, not selling points. Infrastructure means people, protocols, data continuity, referral pathways, and standards, not just more apps. The key word is connected. Right now the pieces exist but do not talk to each other. Infrastructure is what turns scattered services into a system people can rely on.
Menthra talks about moving people from emotional struggle to emotional resolution rather than symptom management. How does this philosophy shape the design of the platform and its care model?
It changes what we build and what we refuse to build. Symptom relief matters. But if that is the whole goal, the product naturally optimises for soothing. Keep the person calm, keep them comfortable, keep them coming back. If your goal is resolution, you optimise for progress. You help someone see the pattern underneath the feeling and actually move through it. Those produce very different products.
In practice it shapes three things. Memory, because you cannot help someone resolve anything if you forget them every time. Resolution needs a thread across time. The triggers, the patterns, the slow progress. The continuum, because real resolution often needs a human, so we are built to hand off to one with context intact instead of trapping people in endless self-service. And our definition of success. Not time spent, but whether someone is genuinely better and needs us less. A platform designed to make itself a little less necessary over time is a very different thing from one designed to keep you. We chose the first one on purpose.
India was chosen as Menthra’s first market despite the company’s global ambitions. What specific market realities made India the right place to launch and validate this model?
India is where the need and the opportunity meet most sharply. The need is enormous, and the gap between that need and formal support is especially stark. Too few clinicians, deep stigma, and care priced out of reach for most people. When you build for the hardest version of a problem, you build something honest. If it works here, affordably, in many languages, at scale, it works anywhere.
There is a deeper reason too. India is mobile-first, and Indians are remarkably open to meeting a need in a new way when the old way was never available to them. You are not displacing an existing habit. You are offering something for the first time. Language and culture matter enormously here. Distress has its own vocabulary and its own silences. Build for that real complexity from day one and you earn something you cannot fake.
India is not our test market. It is the market that will make the product real. And much of the world looks more like India than it looks like Silicon Valley.