BetterHumanThe opportunity
Real-time pattern interruption is a new category.
For decades the personal-growth industry has sold insight as if it were transformation. Therapy, coaching, journalling, podcasts, books. Each one helps a person understand herself. None of them reach the half-second when an old pattern fires faster than thought.
That half-second is the entire market, and no one has built for it. BetterHuman is the first product built for the moment of choice.
Built by a repeat founder: Cornell engineer, Harvard Kennedy MPA, with a prior exit to Accolade Health.
For aligned, qualified investors. Tell us a little about you and we'll set up time.
The video
A short introduction from Founder Susanne.
The category
Insight is not transformation.
The wellness category is saturated with products that explain feelings, name patterns, and surface insight. People love them, follow them, pay them, and still do the same thing at nine o’clock on a Sunday.
The reason is structural. The vast majority of behaviour runs on the unconscious mind. Insight is a conscious-mind product, and the pattern lives one layer below it, in the system that fires in the milliseconds before conscious thought arrives. Therapy, journalling, and self-help all run on the wrong layer.
BetterHuman is built on the layer where the pattern actually lives: a library of more than 125 trained, in-the-moment practices, called codes, that fire before the old reaction can complete. Insight is not transformation. Repeated, lived practice in the moment is. The category has not had a name for this. We are giving it one.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Carl Jung
The market
A 27-million-woman market, peaking at burnout.
The primary buyer is a woman aged 22 to 35, roughly 27 million in the US (US Census Bureau, 2024): the peak-burnout generation, digitally native, already spending on self-improvement, and underserved by anything built for the moment a pattern fires. She is not looking for another explanation. She is looking for steadiness, self-trust, and the ability to catch herself in time.
BetterHuman meets her in language she already uses: overstimulated, spiralling, shutting down, snapping, doom-scrolling, replaying. The product feels like recognition first, not explanation. And the conditions around her are unusually aligned. Demand is documented. Willingness to pay is documented. Digital behaviour is documented. The product she has been sold, insight, is the one she has already exhausted.
74% / 66%
Gen Z and Millennials report moderate-to-acute burnout in 2025, a six-year high.
Aflac WorkForces Report, 2025
$115
average monthly spend on wellness by Millennials.
StyleSeat Survey, 2024
age 25
when Gen Z and Millennials hit peak burnout. Seventeen years earlier than the national average.
Interview Guys / Spectrum News, 2025
59% / 46%
women versus men burnout. The gender gap has more than doubled since 2019.
Gallup, 2024
65%
of patients aged 18 to 35 prefer digital therapy or mobile tools over traditional counselling.
Healthcare IT Stats, 2025
41%+
of US wellness spend is driven by Gen Z and Millennials, who are just 36% of the adult population.
McKinsey Future of Wellness, 2025
The buyer
She has the budget. She has the will. She has run out of options.
The scale
The entry point is not the ceiling.
The 27-million-woman market is the entry, not the boundary. It is concentrated, identifiable, and already saturated with insight products that do not change behaviour, which is precisely why BetterHuman is positioned to become the default brand in this segment, with roughly eighteen months as the target. The order is deliberate: belief first, adoption second, expansion third.
From there, the same system extends outward.
01 · The full adult-women market
The full adult-women market.
The 27-million-woman market (US Census Bureau, 2024) sits inside a far larger US population of adult women who share the same behaviour-change demand. The same product, with adjusted onboarding, opens that market once BetterHuman has earned consumer trust here.
02 · The institutional layer
A $55B+ corporate-wellness category.
Universities come first as a distribution engine. From there the institutional system extends into corporate wellness, a category worth more than $55 billion globally and growing (Grand View Research, 2025), where rising burnout and stress are driving employer demand. The durable ARR layer.
The entry gets us to scale. Scale gets us to category creation.
The mechanism
EnergyOS™ is the moat.
EnergyOS™ is the proprietary system at the centre of the company: a structured library of more than 125 behavioural-intervention codes, developed across decades of private practice and leadership work and synthesised across neuroscience, behavioural psychology, and somatic practice. It is documented, taught, and deliverable independent of any one person, which makes it an asset rather than a personality.
The Millisecond Technique™ is the foundational code that every member enters with. It teaches a person to expand the space between stimulus and response and become more choiceful in real time. Every later code sits on that foundation. An initial set ships at launch; the full library opens to members one month at a time.
AI is not the product story. It is the orchestration layer, and that layer is Mirror: a Next Best Code engine that reduces choice overload and recommends the right intervention for the state she is in. Every wellness app in market is an AI tool with content. BetterHuman is a system with an AI layer. That single distinction is what allows premium pricing, defensibility against copycats, and category creation in the press.
Responsible AI
AI orchestrates. It does not diagnose.
BetterHuman is non-clinical by design. Mirror orchestrates the codes; it does not diagnose, treat, or replace mental healthcare, and the product is built to say so in plain language throughout. The raise funds the safety infrastructure that ships with the MVP: refusal patterns for crisis content, hard-coded escalation to crisis resources, and a clear “this is not a clinician, here is who can help” response.
User content will never be used to train third-party models. The IP is the system; Mirror is the layer that delivers it, inside guardrails.
Go-to-market
Three engines that compound.
Most early-stage consumer brands light every channel at once and underperform on all of them. BetterHuman runs three engines in deliberate order, and each one lowers the cost of the next: belief first, adoption second, expansion third. Belief comes first, lit by the founder’s credibility. Gifting turns believers into a relationship loop. Universities turn that loop into concentrated, near-zero-cost volume that feeds straight back into the consumer business.
01 · Belief
Credibility lights the first wave.
A new category cannot be introduced by paid ads. It needs an earned voice. Susanne’s credibility opens the door: a long-form podcast, a founder-led newsletter, a LinkedIn essay cadence, and a body of work clients already pay premium prices for. That credibility lights the first believers and hand-selects the earliest users. From there, belief hands off to the loops that scale without her. The system itself is documented and operable independent of any one person, so the founder ignites the engine, she is not the engine.
02 · Gifting · The Wise Women
Trust that travels by relationship.
The Wise Women, ages 40 to 75, are her ambassadors: the people who love her, who buy and gift on her behalf. Every member receives codes to give, one member becomes several, and acquisition cost falls as word of mouth compounds. The closest analog is Calm’s growth through gifted subscriptions, except BetterHuman runs it through real relationships, mother to daughter, mentor to mentee, that wellness has never had.
03 · Universities
Near-zero-CAC volume that becomes subscribers.
Campus mental health is in crisis and counselling waitlists run for months, which gives a non-clinical, FERPA-aligned tool a real institutional buyer. A single 500-student licence is 500 activated users at almost no acquisition cost, and graduates convert into direct subscribers. The sales cycle is long; the ARR is durable; the cohorts renew.
Belief feeds gifting. Gifting feeds the campus case. The campus case feeds belief. The flywheel is the moat.
The founder
Founder-market fit, earned over decades.
Cornell, in mechanical engineering and theatre and film. A Harvard Kennedy MPA in social entrepreneurship. Co-founder of four venture-backed companies, including a healthcare data company acquired by Accolade Health.
And decades developing and teaching EnergyOS™, the system that now powers BetterHuman. The product is that work, made software.
Susanne is the rare founder who can speak the language of engineering, the language of media, the language of operators, and the language of the buyer at once, in the same sentence.
The round
Raising to prove it at scale.
BetterHuman is raising $500,000 in pre-seed capital on a SAFE: to complete the MVP and launch the consumer product, initiate the first university pilots, and reach the metrics that de-risk the next round. Activated users, paying subscribers, retention proof, and at least one signed institutional agreement.
This is a friends-and-family round with room for a small number of aligned investors. If the thesis resonates, the moment to meet is now.
We send a short demo video and the deck to qualified investors ahead of the call.
The vision is plain. A world run by healed humans.