ReFresh has raised $2.5 million in a Seed round led by Black Nova Venture Capital, with follow-on investments from Antler and Archangel Ventures. The round closed a fortnight before People at Work — the free survey used by around 5,000 organisations and 160,000 workers to assess psychosocial risk since 2020 — was shut down after Safe Work Australia and state regulators said it no longer reflected current requirements.
Founding and early traction
Harrison Kennedy and Taylor Laing founded ReFresh in 2025 and built the business from opposite sides of the Pacific after a mutual contact introduced them. At the time of the Seed round the startup was six months old, already had employees, had completed a pre-Seed round in December that year, and had customers onboarded before the founders met in person. ReFresh counts clients in financial services, government and ASX-listed tech companies, and the company has now raised more than $4 million in total.
ReFresh: a system, not another survey
ReFresh describes itself as a psychosocial operating platform that gives organisations a single system to identify, assess and manage psychosocial hazards, and to maintain inspection-ready evidence. Kennedy said the aim is to move employers from scattered tools and disconnected records to a unified, auditable workflow: “Most employers have a survey running somewhere, a policy document somewhere else, an incident spreadsheet a manager keeps privately, and no way to show a regulator that any of it connects.”
Kennedy also contrasted ReFresh with People at Work, saying the survey revealed what employees experienced but was not designed to show regulators what organisations did about those issues or to guide organisations on what to fix: “People at Work told organisations what their people were experiencing. It was never designed to tell a regulator what the organisation did about it, or the organisation what to fix. Those are the questions being asked now.”
Personal mission and the scale of the problem
For Kennedy the mission is personal. He was a competitive swimmer and international model in his teens who developed anxiety. At 19 he built a mental health media platform, Really Mental, that was backed by Amazon and reached millions of people. He founded ReFresh at 23. “Really Mental taught me that awareness is not the same thing as change,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy warned regulators are scrutinising how workplaces meet their duties after mental health conditions became the costliest category of workers compensation claims nationally, at 4x the average claim. He framed psychosocial safety as a structural shift akin to physical safety infrastructure: “Physical safety took three decades to get its infrastructure, and it changed how millions of people go to work and come home again. Psychosocial is the same shift compressed into a decade, and it is happening now. Every organisation already runs a system it trusts for payroll and for financial control. Within the decade the same will be true of psychosocial safety.”
Product trust, privacy and compliance mapping
ReFresh says it maps each control to regulatory requirements and tracks changes across Australia’s nine work health and safety jurisdictions; upgrading that compliance mapping is a key area where much of the new funding will be used. The platform is also designed with privacy controls and in-house AI to protect sensitive reporting, a priority according to cofounder Taylor Laing, who led engineering at Insite AI and 1800 Contacts and is based in the US.
“The system asks a person to report the worst things happening to them at work, and asks their employer to hold that information responsibly,” Laing said. “So we built the platform privacy-first: anonymous reporting where needed, granular access controls to protect sensitive data, and AI that runs strictly in our own environment. A system is only useful when the users can trust it. Get that wrong, and no amount of compliance logic will save you.”
Investor and advisor perspectives
Black Nova managing partner Matt Browne, an advisor to ReFresh and cofounder of Donesafe, said existing safety platforms are often built around physical hazards and miss the management decisions needed to control psychosocial risk. “I built one of those platforms, so I know what they were designed for. A physical hazard has a location and a date. You inspect it, you guard it, you close the record,” he said. Browne added: “Psychosocial risk is the workload, the roster, the manager, and the control is redesigning the work – a management decision, not a safety purchase. So the assessment is wrong, the controls are wrong and the evidence is wrong. Bolt a survey onto an incident register and you get a number at one end, a record at the other, and nothing in between.”
Advisors on ReFresh’s roster include Jane Martino, cofounder of Smiling Mind. Antler partner Michael Kron said psychosocial risk is a new duty-of-care frontier for employers worldwide and that the market lacks adequate systems to manage it: “Psychosocial risk is a new duty of care frontier for employers worldwide. Yet the gap with systems to manage it is leaving them wrong-footed,” he said. Kron added that the founders are building a system to help enterprises comply and bring it to market, and are “already on track to being the default system for employee health and safety compliance.”
Decidr AI’s head of people and culture, Bianca Hill, praised the platform’s focus on work design: “ReFresh treats the design of the work as the thing to manage, and gives us a way to see it, change it and show that we did,” she said Bianca Hill.
The Seed funding will support product development, regulatory mapping and continued rollout to enterprise clients seeking a single system to manage psychosocial hazards and evidence their compliance.
