My Big Idea: Nordic wellbeing platform Kara Connect

‍Hi Tobba! What’s your elevator pitch?

Kara Connect is a Nordic wellbeing platform that gives employees direct, fast access to real human professionals, including psychologists, physiotherapists, financial coaches, and more, through a customised “Wellbeing Hub” provided by their employer. There’s no phone triage and no gatekeeping: people choose their own practitioner and are usually seen within 48 hours. Around 3,000 vetted practitioners now support more than 25,000 employees at companies such as Vodafone, KPMG, and Deloitte. We’re a genuine alternative to the old Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), built so the company, the employee and the practitioner all win.

Why does the market need it?

Have you ever tried to use a company’s EAP? It is like navigating a labyrinth. You call a number, get triaged by a stranger and, if you’re lucky enough to clear the bar, told help will arrive in a few weeks. A few weeks!

Meanwhile, one in five adults will have a diagnosable mental health condition this year. And we've heard from employees going through all sorts, like a relationship breakdown, feeling completely bereft, being told their situation 'isn't severe enough'.

EAPs are designed to intervene once you're unwell enough to qualify, which creates a huge problem. Most see engagement of just 2 to 8% of staff. The help exists, but it's just buried behind a gatekeeper nobody wants to call.

We flipped the model and removed the gatekeeper. People browse vetted practitioners and book the person they want, usually within 48 hours, across mental health, physical health, finances, relationships and careers. When you make help easy and private, people actually use it. At Kara Connect, we typically see around 32% of an organisation engaging.

Where is the business today?

We’re in a strong growth phase. More than 90 companies have launched their own Wellbeing Hub — from Vodafone and KPMG to Deloitte, the Blue Lagoon and the University of Iceland — and over 25,000 employees now have access. We often add on hubs for leadership or neurodiversity. The milestone I’m proudest of this year is a four-year, €2.7m framework agreement, won through a public, security-first tender led by Eurofound, to provide the service to a network of 31 EU agencies and their 20,000 staff. We’re scaling steadily across Europe, with a clear, data-driven path to break-even in 2027.

What made you think there was money in this?

Honestly, it didn’t start with money. It started with frustration. I trained as a research psychologist, and later spent years in politics, and in both worlds I kept seeing the same thing: people who needed help couldn’t get to it, while the systems meant to support them were clogged, offered the wrong support, were slow or stigmatising. I saw this across all sectors: children's support, welfare support, health systems, and support at work.

I became convinced the bottleneck wasn’t a shortage of good practitioners — there are thousands of them — it was the lack of a fair, trusted way to connect them with the people who need them. And when I looked at how employers were spending on wellbeing, I saw real money going into EAPs that almost nobody used. There was a clear opportunity to build something people genuinely engage with, pay practitioners fairly instead of skimming a margin off them, and let employers finally see a return. So that is how our ecosystem was born.

What’s your biggest strength?

Our biggest strength is that we’re a true upgrade to the EAP, not just a slightly nicer version. The difference is structural. Traditional EAPs operate on a call-centre triage model, with low usage and real concerns about confidentiality. We let employees choose their own vetted practitioner directly, in full confidentiality with no triage barrier, and we keep all data within the EU/EEA — privacy-by-design and fully GDPR-compliant. That’s why our engagement runs at around 32%, against an EAP industry norm of 3 to 8%.

It’s also why the EU agencies chose us to give their 20,000 staff exactly this kind of access. For me, that’s the clearest signal yet of where workplace wellbeing is heading: away from the box-ticking benefit and towards the right support people genuinely trust and use.

What is the secret to making the business work?

The secret is building trust with all stakeholders. That is how you build a “win-win-win” model, and refusing to break trust even when it would be easier commercially. Companies have to see a real return, employees have to get real help they trust, and practitioners have to be treated fairly. Most of our industry quietly takes a margin off the practitioner. We don’t, because the moment you squeeze the supply side, the quality collapses and the whole promise falls apart.

The hardest challenge is earning trust on two fronts at once. Employees have to believe their employer will never see their private sessions, and employers have to believe they’re getting value they can measure. We solve it by separating the two completely - fully confidential care for the individual and practitioner, and anonymised, aggregated outcome data for the company. Hold that line, and everything else works.

How do you market the company?

By telling the truth and being transparent about results. Evidence first, always. We’re in a sector full of bold claims, so our discipline is that every number we put in front of a CFO or HR director is one we can stand behind. A lot of our growth is relationship-led and reputational. Real case studies, real utilisation data, and proof points like the EU agencies’ deal mean serious buyers trust us quickly.

What funding do you have? Is it enough?

We’re well backed and, just as importantly, we’re disciplined about it. Like most scale-ups in our space, we’ve raised across several rounds to build the platform and the security, vet the practitioner network and expand across Europe. What I care about more than the headline number is the trajectory. We are now aiming towards break-even in a few months' time, but we have a big idea in the works that will be game-changing in the flow of help. So we are now looking into “kissing frogs,” as I often say, to see if we can get a fund building with us.

Tell us about the business model

It’s a B2B subscription model. Employers pay for access to a customised Wellbeing Hub, content webinars and practitioners, and the pricing scales with the size of their workforce, so a large multinational and a 100-person company can both make it work. That recurring, per-employee model is what gives us predictable revenue and a clear route to break-even.

On the cost side, the biggest lever is utilisation. Because we pay our practitioners fairly, our economics depend on genuine engagement in each account; employers pay only for the sessions used; we are not selling a benefit that sits unused. That’s actually the opposite of the classic EAP model, which is profitable precisely because so few people ever call.

What were you doing before?

I’m a research psychologist by training and, before joining Kara Connect, I spent several years in politics and public life in Iceland. Those two things shaped everything about this company. Psychology taught me how much difference timely, and the right human support makes. My focus was brain development, and I know that we will discuss brain health a lot in the coming years. Then, as a politician, I started thinking of systems and processes and how important it is to build for scale. Kara Connect is really our attempt to fix the scaling problem of increased need for help in the workplace, which is where so many adults actually are when they first start to struggle. I am really proud of our clients’ managers, the first movers, who see the bigger picture.

Are there any technologies you’ve found useful?

Connectivity is the core brilliance of technology. For us, building product silos is key, but connecting them with data is key to our future. Being able to give practitioners a fully functional workstation for their sensitive data, connect them to employees across different companies, and provide managers with data on how their employees are doing is really magical. Secondly, the technology that matters most to the employees is the matching and measurements, quietly getting the right person to the right practitioner, quickly, because that first connection is where trust is either won or lost.

For me personally I am in a Claude-psychosis state really. I am feeling the super-power the AI models gives you but also the feeling of not being able to stop. At Kara Connect we discuss the opportunities daily and building our own system to grow with the AI world next to us. I think all of your readers must already connect to the feeling!

What is the future vision?

My vision is that getting help early becomes as normal and as easy as any other part of working life across Europe and beyond. Mental health is now employers’ single biggest workplace concern, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up exactly where a CFO feels it: in absence, in attrition, long-term leaves and increasingly in insurance premiums.

So the frontier we’re most excited about is supporting people through the hardest moments, including those on mental-health sick leave, and the journey back to work, without ever compromising the confidentiality that makes employees trust us in the first place. If we get that right, we don’t just save companies money; we change the lives of the many people who quietly fall through the cracks. And that’s something worth building.

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