Maintaining a healthy wellbeing in and outside of work can occasionally feel like an uphill battle. Striking that optimum balance between productivity and rest is no mean feat. With more organisations recognising the importance of looking out for the wellbeing of their team, we’re in a midst of a cultural shift for the better. On top of this, the Tech for Good sector is booming. We’re seeing numerous impact driven businesses emerge, backed by investors, passionate teams and loyal consumers.
Wellbeing can be compromised by a myriad of factors. Financial worries, loneliness, workplace pressure or exclusion; the list goes on. But, alongside any problem, comes the opportunity for a technical solution. Here we are featuring 5 wellbeing tech startups in the South West seeking to address the wellness of the nation with their innovative ideas.
Famli
First up we have Famli. This organisation is built around ensuring children have wellness centred in their lives from day one. As co-founder Benjamin Draper summarises, “We help families improve their overall health in a fun and simple way, through engaging wellbeing activities within a gamified mobile app experience.”
The two pronged approach provides both teachers and parents access to over 200 fun wellbeing challenges & activities, covering exercise, nutrition and mental health. The startup’s wholesome mission is to build a world in which more families wake up feeling healthy and happy.
To achieve this, Famli aspires to transform how wellbeing education is delivered in schools, whilst equipping families with access to a simple and engaging digital solution.
Benjamin elaborates, “Many families struggle to implement healthy activities into their routine, with parents being busy and having many other responsibilities, as well as children usually finding healthy habits to be boring and uninteresting. Our solution offers families an effective tool to improve their wellbeing through intergenerational activities and gamification features – maximising engagement.”
The Bristol-based startup successfully crowd funded £144k last September following their success in reaching the Silicon Gorge 2021 finals. Benjamin and his co-founder William Testeil are currently taking Famli to the next stage, thanks to the funding alongside support from Innovate UK EDGE. See how Innovate UK EDGE can elevate your startup here.
In this interview with Famli, you can learn more about the team’s ambitions and progress.
Fethr
Next up is Fethr, an app based on building student communities. The premise is all about friendship. Two University of Bristol alumni founded the business as the first lockdown highlighted just how lonely the world can get. Unfortunately, that wasn’t a feeling unique to the pandemic.
Fethr was born out of conversation co-founders and flatmates Julian Issa, Miguel Bravo and Gerardo Rodriguez had when the trio realised they had felt isolated long before Covid struck. “Meaningful human connection shouldn’t be such a difficult thing to find in the 21st century and that is why we started Fethr,” explains Julian.
So how does it work? Student accommodation can integrate fethr’s community online experience API into their app to build stronger communities and deepen friendships. Or fethr can build an app from scratch for them, integrating its community API but also all the functions students will want and need.
Fethr also runs engaging workshops. For freshers, their speed friending workshops condense the friendship building process from 2 months to 2 hours. You can book a demo to explore their career development and purpose building workshops as well.
FlourishZone
Keeping with the F alliteration, FlourishZone is another fantastic bath-based organisation putting wellness first with tech.
FlourishZone is revolutionising the way employers address the £200 billion per annum cost of poor productivity, low well-being and sub-optimal resilience. Their augmented intelligence platform provides a hyper-personalised AI Coach for every employee. Through leveraging thousands of scientific insights, expert improvement tools, and behavioural change methods, it engages and empowers people to fulfil their potential and make a difference in organisations they’re proud of.
Their AI engine is built on the science of flourishing, well-being, resilience and performance. So it can help you build skills to live a longer, more fulfilling life, as well as doing better at work. You have your own confidential world where you can develop whatever skills you like. But you are also empowered to help improve your team and organisation by taking part in shared development worlds.
The AI coach is called Suny®; it gives every employee hyper-personalised support to increase productivity, wellbeing and resilience.
Good With
3.3 million 18-24 year olds in the UK struggle with their financial wellbeing. Who is tackling this problem? Enter Good With.
This Cornwall-based startup marks the convergence of fintech and wellbeing. Good With aims to help those struggling with their finances, specifically in the wake of the current cost of living crisis that is hitting Gen Z the hardest.
With their handy app, consumers can manage, learn and stress less about their money with a personal AI money coach. The team is still building the app to bring it to the optimum place to empower people to cope with money stress and begin your own money wellbeing journey.
Explaining how it all works in more detail, Nathan Copeland, Researcher & Marketer at Good With, tells us, “Our chatbot offers personalised financial support specifically tailored to the individual user. The more they chat, the better catered our chatbot can be in delivering conversations relevant to the user. By analysing an individual’s data and patterns, our chatbot can provide tailored support on financial topics relevant to the user that takes into account personal needs, goals and circumstances.” The idea is end generic tips and endless googling for irrelevant advice.
Good With takes a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach, as advised by their financial wellbeing psychologist, doctoral candidate in counselling psychology at the University of the West of England, Chandini.
“When a thought is unhelpful and we fall back into our habitual behaviour patterns, [CBT] can be useful to help reframe our money mindset. Oftentimes when it comes to our money, our beliefs or thoughts are often the things halting us from achieving our financial goals,” Chandini explains. Money and mental health cannot be treated separately and should ultimately be treated as one, in order to improve young adult’s overall sense of financial wellbeing.
Paranimo
Paranimo is a mental health technology company that matches people to the right support whilst reducing the time and complexity it takes to get that support. Paranimo firmly believes technology can bring people together and empower them to take control of their mental health and wellbeing.
The organisation was founded as the team knew how hard it is to get the right support. Mental health challenges are highly personal and require a specialist. There are all kinds of mental health issues that affect work-life, including substance addiction, depression, anxiety, relationship failures, trauma and the list goes on.
Finding the right advice requires the right therapist, something that traditional mental health support at work rarely accommodates. Paranimo enables access to a growing network of professional counsellors, each with their own specialism, unique expertise and approach. Mental health is personal to the individual, so the care chosen should be personal too.
The premise behind Paranimo is to provide swift access to the right support, using tech to enhance this process.
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