Meet Daniel Botcherby & Charlotte Fountaine, Co-Founders of LGBTQIA+ Mental Wellbeing App: Kalda

Kalda is an LGBTQIA+ community mental wellbeing app providing weekly group therapy and daily peer to peer support.

Having a supportive community is the key to mental wellbeing and everyone should have access to unbiased and affordable mental health support. Kalda provides a curated therapy experience. Users receive daily self reflection questions written by an LGBTQIA+ therapist and can access weekly group therapy sessions.

 

 

Tell Us About the Business, How Did it Start?

 
Kalda is the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mental wellbeing app. People in the LGBTQIA+ community are disproportionately affected by mental health issues – and are 3 times more likely than the general population to experience loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

We found that this is due to stigma, and a lack of therapists with relevant, lived experience. In other words, people wanted an LGBTQIA+ therapist, but there aren’t enough to keep up with demand.

We created Kalda so that everyone can access affordable and relevant gender and sexuality affirming mental health support. And we found this resonated with people: we have users in 10 countries using the app, and we’re on-track to hit thousands of users by the end of the year.

 

 

How Are You Different From Other Companies on the Market?

 
First and foremost we’re for the community by the community. We’re the only video self therapy app offering gender and sexuality affirming care. We were tired of the one-size fits all approach to mental health support that generalised everyone’s experience without factoring in the effects of intersectionality. We found that people exploring their gender and/or sexuality needed a place to get support quickly, and at a low-cost. For the price of a single therapy session, people can access Kalda for an entire year.

Both my cofounder and I have a background in digital mental health products and evaluation, so the first thing we did was run a health trial to understand Kalda’s efficacy. We found that we had a clinically significant decrease in anxiety and depression after just 6 weeks. Our next steps are to see what impact we can have in 2 weeks.

 

Have You Faced Any Challenges?

 
As a team with a female founder and a mixed-race founder, by gaining VC investment we are bucking a trend. The latest statistics show people from our demographic are less likely to gain funding. We have been really lucky to connect with aligned investors who understand that the startup landscape needs to be more diverse, and we want investors to continue to see that LGBTQIA+ tech has huge potential.

 

What Can We Hope to See From the Business in the Future?

 
We are creating a future where we say to everyone, we’re with you, and you are not alone. We stand for sexuality, gender, and relationship diversity and will be the provider of gender and sexuality affirming mental health support and longevity across the world.

 

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