BREAKING Refresh folds every benefit into one branded app 80% of the workforce is deskless - Refresh builds for them 185% reported jump in benefits usage Started 2007 as Refresh Body, an on-demand massage concierge Seed round backed by SHRMLabs Connects thousands of HR tools into one SuperApp HQ: NEW YORK CITY BREAKING Refresh folds every benefit into one branded app 80% of the workforce is deskless - Refresh builds for them 185% reported jump in benefits usage Started 2007 as Refresh Body, an on-demand massage concierge Seed round backed by SHRMLabs Connects thousands of HR tools into one SuperApp HQ: NEW YORK CITY
Refresh logo - hand-painted brushstrokes around the Refresh wordmark
Fig. 1 - The wordmark, ringed by paint. A wellness company that never quite scrubbed the color off its hands.
Company Profile / HR Technology
Employee Experience SuperApp

Refresh

One white-labeled app for every benefit, message, and moment - built for the 80% of workers who don't sit at a desk.

◷ Founded 2007 ◉ New York, NY ⚑ Seed / SHRMLabs ◈ ~130 employees
The Scene

A phone buzzes on a hotel loading dock

It is 6:47 a.m. A housekeeper clocks in, and before she has found her cart, a notification lands: a shift swap approved, a wellness stipend she didn't know she had, a shout-out from a manager two floors up. No laptop. No intranet login. No HR portal she'd need a training session to navigate. Just a tap on the app her employer calls its own - which is, quietly, Refresh.

This is the ordinary miracle Refresh is chasing: not a flashy new perk, but the boring, unglamorous work of making the perks a company already pays for actually reach the person who needs them. Most enterprise software is built for the person with the swivel chair. Refresh is built for everyone else.


By the Numbers

Small company, large idea

185%
Reported usage lift
~80%
Of workers are deskless
2007
Year it began
$1.5M
Seed raised
~130
Employees
What It Is

The SuperApp, explained without the buzzword

A "SuperApp" usually means everything-for-everyone, which usually means nothing-for-anyone. Refresh dodges that trap with segmentation - the same install shows a nurse and a night-shift stocker two different worlds.

01

Orchestration Layer

Connects thousands of existing HR, payroll, and collaboration tools, then routes the right resource to the right person at the right moment.

02

Benefits Discovery

Surfaces contextual suggestions and manages insurance, reimbursements, and wellness dollars so unused benefits get found and claimed.

03

Rewards & Recognition

Gamified, peer-to-peer appreciation that makes a thank-you visible instead of buried in an inbox.

04

Communication Suite

Push, text, email, and a social feed - reaching hybrid and deskless workers where the intranet never could.

05

Engagement & Wellness

Pulse surveys, challenges, and wellness tracking, with AI-powered sentiment analysis to read feedback at scale.

06

Onboarding & eLearning

Segmented onboarding journeys, scheduling, and manager training - tailored by population or by need.

A benefit nobody can find is a benefit nobody has. - The thesis behind Refresh's findability bet
The Long Way Round

From massage tables to middleware

The origin story is stranger than the pitch deck. In 2007, in New York City, Refresh was not software at all. It was Refresh Body - an on-demand wellness concierge co-founded by Mark Brycman, dispatching massage therapists, yoga teachers, and Pilates instructors to offices, corporations, and hotels. The product was a human being with good hands and a folding table.

That business taught the company a lesson no HR whitepaper could: the gap between the wellness a company buys and the wellness its people actually use is enormous. A stipend nobody remembers. A benefit buried three logins deep. A perk that expires unclaimed.

So Refresh changed careers. It kept the wellness instinct and traded the folding table for a phone. The concierge became an orchestration layer - the same goal, delivering care to a workforce, now expressed in software that could reach far more people than any therapist ever could.

Today, led by founder and CEO Logan Sugarman - whose path runs through Wall Street, climate tech, and enterprise software - Refresh sells a fully white-labeled SuperApp to mid-to-large enterprises. Employees open an app with their own company's name on it and never see the vendor behind the curtain. The best software, after all, disappears.

Timeline

A slow burn

2007

Launches as Refresh Body in NYC - on-demand massage, yoga, and Pilates for offices, corporations, and hotels.

2010s

Expands from on-location wellness services toward a technology model, seeding the pivot into HR tech.

2022-23

Publishes guidance on tracking "wellness dollars" and defining the employee-experience platform - sharpening its benefits-utilization focus.

2024

Closes a Seed round (~$1.5M) with SHRMLabs among the backers, formalizing the SuperApp era.

The Findability Bet

Distribution beats features

Refresh's core claim isn't that it invents better perks - it's that it makes existing ones visible. This illustrative chart shows the story it tells: same benefits budget, more of it actually reaching people.

Illustrative - benefits reaching employees (before vs. after)
Typical portal (buried)~35%
Refresh SuperApp (surfaced)~100%
Reported usage lift+185%
Who It's For

Built for the workers you can't see from head office

The Enterprise

Mid-to-large orgs

Hospitality, healthcare, retail, and tech companies fighting benefit underutilization and turnover.

The Frontline

Deskless & hybrid

Housekeepers, nurses, stockers, drivers - the mobile majority no intranet ever reached.

The HR Team

One dashboard

Admins who want one branded app instead of a dozen ignored tools and a wall of logins.

Marginalia

Five things worth knowing

Back to the Dock

6:47 a.m., revisited

Return to the housekeeper on the loading dock. A decade ago, the version of Refresh that could have helped her would have arrived as a person with a folding table - useful, but only for the lucky few in the room that day. Now the help arrives as a tap: the stipend she'd have missed, the shift swap she'd have chased by phone, the recognition she'd never have heard about.

The buzz in her pocket isn't a grand reinvention of work. It's something smaller and harder - the same benefits, finally finding the person they were bought for. Refresh spent seventeen years learning that this was the actual problem. The rest is just software doing what the folding table couldn't: showing up everywhere at once.