MindFi Wants to Fix the Part of Work Nobody Puts in the Deck

There is a slide in almost every company deck about people being the most valuable asset. There is rarely a slide about what happens when those people quietly fall apart. MindFi, a mental health company built in Singapore, exists in that gap - the space between the thing employers say and the thing they measure. Its answer is unglamorous and specific: put a therapist, a coach, a chat window and a set of self-care tools inside one app, hand it to employees as a benefit, and give the human resources team an honest picture of whether any of it is working.

The company was founded in 2017 and grew up inside a problem that Silicon Valley mostly waves at from a distance. Across much of Asia, licensed mental health professionals are scarce, the stigma around asking for help runs deep, and the wellness software that does exist tends to arrive pre-loaded with assumptions from somewhere else. A meditation script written for a user in San Francisco does not necessarily land for an employee in Jakarta, Manila or Mumbai. MindFi's founders decided that the mismatch was not a rounding error. It was the whole opportunity.

The thesis

01Care that speaks the user's language - literally

The word MindFi keeps returning to is "culturally relevant." In practice that means the platform tries to match employees to providers not only on availability, but on language, religion, communication style and lived context. The company says it supports care in 16 languages and has onboarded more than 1,500 therapists and coaches. The pitch is less "download this app and breathe" and more "here is someone who understands the specific room you are sitting in."

That second visit matters more than it sounds. Plenty of wellbeing apps win the download and lose the human the next morning. One of MindFi's stated values is "progress over perfection" - the belief that consistent, small support beats a grand launch nobody returns to. It is a product decision dressed as a slogan, and it points at the metric the company cares about: engagement, not installs.

The product

02One app, four front doors

Open MindFi and there is no single prescribed path. Someone in crisis at 2 a.m. can reach 24/7 text and chat support. Someone who wants to talk to a professional can be matched to a therapist or coach and book a session. Someone not ready to say anything out loud can work through audio-guided self-care exercises and self-assessments. Someone who just wants to feel less alone can join community forums and group sessions. The design lowers the cost of the first step to nearly zero, which in a stigma-heavy region is the entire game.

Behind the calm interface sits an intelligent matching layer - the founding team includes an AI engineer, and routing employees to the right provider is treated as an engineering problem rather than a lucky guess. The app also pulls in wearable data such as sleep, heart rate and activity, using the signals to personalize what it recommends. None of this is loud. That is rather the point.

What can an employee actually do with it? Book a session with a coach before a hard performance review. Message a counselor at midnight without waiting for an office to open. Run a five-minute audio exercise between meetings. Sit in a group session with people carrying the same load. For a distributed workforce spread across time zones, the value is less any single feature than the fact that all of them live in one place, on a phone the person already carries.

The buyer

03Who actually pays, and why they keep paying

MindFi runs a B2B2C model. Employers buy the platform and offer it as a benefit; employees use the care for free. That arrangement is common in this category, so the interesting question is retention, and here MindFi built something its rivals often skip: a wellbeing dashboard for HR. The care itself is private, but the platform surfaces anonymized, aggregate trends - engagement, usage patterns, program automation - so a people team can point to a number instead of a feeling.

This is the part worth stealing for anyone selling wellbeing into a large organization. The employee wants care that feels human. The buyer wants proof the budget did something. MindFi tries to serve both from the same app, and it is why its client roster reads the way it does. Reported customers include Visa, BlackRock, KPMG, Deutsche Bank, PatSnap, Willis Towers Watson, Yara International, Fresha and CrimsonLogic - the kind of multinationals that do not renew software on vibes.

The founders

04A psychologist, an engineer and a two-time founder walk into a startup

MindFi's founding team is the sort of mix that usually gets talked about after the fact. Bjorn Lee, a former Zendesk product manager, started the company and served as its early chief executive. Anita Sadasivan brought the clinical side as a psychologist trained at the University of Michigan. Gangeshwar Krishnamurthy, now chief technology officer, handled the AI. Leon CK Leong, a serial entrepreneur with two prior exits - his marketing-tech firm Techsailor was acquired by TO THE NEW - now leads the company as chief executive.

It is a deliberately unbalanced roster: clinical, technical and commercial, rather than three people with the same resume. The company also leans on outside advisors, including Professor E.H. Kua in medicine, mindfulness researcher Professor Steve Hickman, and technologist Yen-Lu Chow. For a product that has to be both medically sound and genuinely usable, the blend is the strategy.

The money

05Small rounds, deliberate climb

MindFi has not raised the kind of headline war chest that Western competitors flaunt. It took roughly US$750,000 in a pre-seed round, then closed an oversubscribed US$2 million seed in February 2022, bringing total funding to somewhere near US$3 million. The seed was led by M Venture Partners and Global Founders Capital, with angel checks from names like Carousell co-founder Marcus Tan, Carro's Kenji Narushima and Spin co-founder Derrick Ko. Along the way the company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch.

The field

06Where MindFi sits on the board

The corporate mental health market is crowded and getting more so. In the United States, well-funded players like Lyra Health, Spring Health and Modern Health dominate, alongside consumer giants Headspace and Calm pushing enterprise versions. Closer to home, MindFi shares the APAC field with Intellect, ThoughtFull and Naluri - regional startups chasing the same enterprise budgets.

MindFi's separation is not scale or spend; it is focus. Where a global platform localizes as an afterthought, MindFi treats "global by default" as a founding constraint and builds outward from Asia's languages, faiths and communication norms. In a category where the hard part is getting a reluctant employee to open the app twice, being the option that feels made for them, rather than translated for them, is the competitive edge the company is betting on.

There is also the matter of expertise, which in this category is not optional. A wellbeing app that gets the clinical part wrong is worse than no app at all. MindFi's structure - a psychologist among the founders, academic advisors in medicine and mindfulness, a vetted provider network and a head of clinical care - is an attempt to keep the software honest. The company operates under the legal entity Jaedye Labs, and its four stated values (People First, Global by Default, Progress Over Perfection, Measure What Matters) function less as decoration than as a filter for what ships.

Whether the larger bet pays off will show up in the least dramatic place imaginable - renewal rates and the second session count, not press releases. But for a company trying to change how an entire region treats the quiet cost of work, unglamorous and specific may be exactly the right register.