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.
That is the quiet ending. The other is Lynskey v Direct Line, where the woman didn't go quietly: she took it to tribunal and won, on a public judgment. Both endings are expensive. The quiet exit costs you the person and everything she knew; the tribunal costs you that, plus the award, plus your name on the ruling. Your 2027 action plan is meant to make both less likely.
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 a duty on large employers to publish equality action plans that must include menopause support. From 6 April 2026 employers can publish one voluntarily; for employers of 250 or more it is expected to become mandatory from spring 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 Q3 2026.
Clinical sign-off is a required gate in our release process: no clinical-facing prompt, safety pattern, or content surface ships to production without sign-off from a registered clinician accountable for clinical governance and safety. A Clinical Director is being appointed to hold that accountability before launch.
Safety patterns are conservative by design. High-severity signals (anything suggesting risk to the person) page a human in real time, always. For the first 100 conversations in production, every flagged conversation gets human review, not only the high-severity ones.
Special-category health data is handled under UK GDPR, with a full audit trail, retention controls, and consent management. Conversations are never used to train AI models. Today the AI models we use retain data only briefly, for safety and abuse monitoring, before deletion; before launch we will have a zero-data-retention arrangement and a UK GDPR data processing agreement in place with our AI provider, so that conversations are not stored after processing except where the law requires or to prevent misuse. Your data is stored in the UK, and AI processing is carried out by our provider under that agreement.
Vivian is built by Sentio Health, the workplace mental-health company spun out of Podium Venture Studio, an AI-native venture studio building companies in UK regulated verticals. It is led by founder Sanjay Wadhwani: three decades in regulated finance and sixteen years building startups, who founded one of the UK's first venture builders and launched its first SEIS fund in 2012.
Alongside him, he is building a senior team and advisory bench across healthcare, HR, and the legal profession to hold the clinical governance, workplace expertise, and employment-law grounding the platform depends on.
Sentio Health 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