Unmind: Co-founder and CTO, zero to Series B
01 · Situation
Building a category that didn't exist yet
In 2016 workplace mental health was not a category. Employee assistance programmes existed, but sat on the margin of HR: paper leaflets, telephone helplines, low uptake. Nothing digital, nothing measurable, nothing employees would actually open.
Unmind was founded to build the workplace mental-health platform that side didn't have yet. Not another meditation app repackaged for employers, but a clinical-grade product measured against real outcomes, sold into HR and benefits leaders, integrated into how large employers actually run.
Nick had been working in tech-for-good since 2013 and cared about mental health specifically, long before it was a mainstream conversation, in 2016 almost nobody talked about it openly. He was introduced to Dr Nick Taylor, freshly out of the NHS with clinical grounding but no technical background. The two moved fast: straight into fundraising and building an MVP so they could bring on the rest of the founding team, eventually four co-founders including Ry Morgan and Steve Peralta. The starting thesis drew on Nick's own back catalogue: an earlier project using threaded text-message navigation for an award-winning Channel 4 interactive theatre piece became the model for delivering small, digestible pieces of mental-health content to employees. They built the MVP quickly, brought in designers to prove out the user flows, tested it in market, and took the traction to investors.
02 · What I did
Built the technical foundations across every stage
From a two-person founding team to a Series B engineering organisation, the CTO remit spanned every layer: product architecture, engineering hiring, clinical integrity, and enterprise security.
- Product architecture:Kept the stack minimal and light on purpose, fast to market, easy to adapt. Content ran on a simple CMS paired with pre-AI bot technology to deliver it in a conversational, seamless way. Security was built in from day one rather than bolted on: a secure DevOps approach and a zero-trust architecture protecting data across a single-tenant environment, appropriate for a product handling people's mental health data.
- Engineering team:Went from two founders to a full team, moving off early contractors onto full-time hires, with product managers reporting into the CPO and technical hires reporting into me. Brought the data team in early, which paid off directly in how fast we could iterate on content. Retention was remarkable for a startup: nobody left for the first three years, built on real psychological safety and flexibility from day one, and good diversity in the team as we scaled. Engineering grew faster than the rest of the org, often two to three times the headcount growth rate, because product speed demanded it.
- Clinical & product partnership:Content, product, and engineering worked as one unit rather than handing off between silos. I worked closely with Steve Peralta, co-founder and Head of Content, and together the three functions turned clinically valid material into something that felt light and digestible rather than clinical. The architecture was built so content could change and ship fast, which mattered because clinical accuracy and product speed usually pull against each other.
- Enterprise security:Enterprise buyers meant a constant stream of infosec questionnaires, so we streamlined that process rather than answering each one from scratch. We moved toward ISO 27001 early, getting it done inside the first two years, and built a genuinely strong incident response capability. By year three we'd rolled out on-call support, which I led.
The specifics (the stack, team-shape decisions, hire names, security certifications, round-by-round diligence themes) are available on a call. Some are public, some are not. If you're building a category-defining product and want the operating detail, book a 30-minute discovery call.
03 · Outcome
A category-defining platform at Series B
Unmind closed a $47M Series B in May 2021, led by EQT Ventures, backing a business that had gone from category-creator to category-leader over five years. The technical foundations built in the CTO years continue to run the platform today.
Unmind today: the platform supports over 2.5 million people across employers globally, including some of the largest brands in the world. Nick's technical work through the founding years established the architecture that supports it.
Building the category yourself?
Book a 30-minute discovery call. Honest conversation about the technical foundations a category-creating product needs, and what usually gets missed in the founding years.