Vivian is a confidential AI navigator for menopause and women's mental health at work: calm, evidence-based, and private by design. Built to give your 2027 action plan something real behind it.
A senior woman in your organisation is two years into perimenopause and does not know it. Her sleep is broken. Her concentration is going. She is irritable in a way that is unlike her, and she knows it, and that knowledge is its own kind of exhaustion.
Her GP appointment lasts seven minutes. She leaves with a prescription for an SSRI and a sense that she has not been heard. Two months later her manager schedules a difficult performance conversation, with no framework for what is happening to her. It does not go well. She begins documenting things. A grievance follows. Eight months after that: a settlement, an NDA, a quiet exit. She does not return to work.
You did not see this happen. The system around her was working as designed.
This is the pattern in Lynskey v Direct Line. It is the pattern in every menopause employment tribunal of the last three years. It is the pattern your 2027 action plan is supposed to interrupt.
In 2023 an employment tribunal awarded Maxine Lynskey £65,000 from Direct Line and ruled that menopause symptoms can constitute a disability under the Equality Act 2010. The Employment Rights Act 2025 introduced menopause action plans as a workforce-policy framework. From April 2026 employers can publish one voluntarily; for employers of 250 or more it is expected to become mandatory from 2027, subject to secondary legislation, carrying the same regulatory weight as gender pay gap reporting.
Every HR Director and Head of People at a 250+ employer knows this is coming. Procurement decisions for 2027 are happening now, in 2026, because that is how procurement works. The conversation in your organisation is either already underway or about to be.
The question is not whether you need a response. It is whether the response you are about to procure is any good.
Not a wellbeing app. Not another mindfulness platform. Not a chatbot trained on menopause Wikipedia. The insight is that detection happens too late and at the wrong layer: by the time HR sees a grievance, the woman has been struggling alone for eighteen months, the manager has been improvising for six, and the clinical system has misdiagnosed her at least once.
No individual conversation ever surfaces to the employer. Minimum cohort size is enforced at the database layer. The launch surface ships in twelve weeks.
Clinical sign-off is held by our CEO, whose NHS research background spans multiple medical disciplines: what the platform needs at the governance layer is breadth across specialties, not depth in one. No clinical-facing prompt, safety pattern, or content surface ships to production without that sign-off.
Safety patterns are conservative by design. Every red-flag signal pages a human in real time until the system has run for at least 100 conversations in production.
Data residency is UK. Special-category health data under UK GDPR is treated as such, with full audit trail, retention controls, and consent management. No foundation model retains or trains on these conversations.
Vivian is built by Podium Venture Studio, an AI-native venture studio building companies in UK regulated verticals, led by founder Sanjay Wadhwani: three decades in regulated finance and sixteen years in startup engineering, who built one of the UK's first venture builders and launched its first SEIS fund in 2012.
Alongside him, senior professionals from healthcare, HR, and the legal profession serve as co-founders and board advisers, holding clinical governance, workplace expertise, and employment-law grounding for the platform.
Podium Venture Studio is also building Daniel, the men's mental-health counterpart to Vivian on the same platform, launching September 2026 at talktodaniel.co.uk.
We are opening design-partner conversations with a small number of HR Directors, Heads of People, and Wellbeing Leads at UK employers between 200 and 2,000 employees, who have watched some version of that arc happen inside their organisation.
In return: one thirty-minute conversation now to see whether the fit is real; honest feedback throughout; and permission to learn from your data in a clinically appropriate way. No commitment is made on either side from the conversation itself.
One thirty-minute call to see whether the fit is real. If it is not, you will both know within twenty minutes, and you will have a useful read on what is being built in this category.
We read every request personally and will reply within two working days to find a time. If you would rather lock in a slot now, you can book directly.
Book a 30-minute call