Anshita Pandey is Closing the Gap in Emotional Wellness

In any given year, one in five Canadians will experience a mental health issue—but almost 50% of them will not be able to access the help they need. The reasons vary, from the stigma of seeking out help to difficulty finding a mental health professional. It is a sobering statistic, one that Anshita Pandey has experienced firsthand. 

Anshita is the founder of Helprr, a platform that helps guide people through emotional challenges and provide preventative wellness guidance. But becoming a founder was not something she said she had planned for when she moved to Canada to study business at Conestoga College.

“I didn’t wake up one day wanting to launch a startup,” she said. “The idea came from my lived experience. I lost a loved one and the healing journey took a long time. I then realized how emotional wellness resources were not easily accessible.”

Pandey’s experiences inspired her to find a way to give help to others.

Helprr is designed for people who are “functioning but struggling.” The core audience is students and early career professionals who are dealing with stress, experiencing burnout or loneliness, or just emotionally overwhelmed. Pandey explained these are often people who don’t seek out support, even though it would benefit them.

“We try to help people before they reach a breaking point. We focus on prevention and early support by giving them the tools that allow them to build emotional resilience as part of everyday life,” she said.

Helprr’s features include guided check-ins, emotional skill building, and curated resources. Pandey is quick to note that Helprr does not replace a therapist or emergency mental health care. Instead, the platform is trying to reduce the friction and stigma in accessing mental and emotional wellness care.

“It’s about building daily habits for emotional well-being like someone who goes to the gym for their physical health,” she said. “We also want to meet people where they are. So if they need crisis support, yes, we will help navigate them to what's available near them.”

Pandey is also working with community partners like Wellness on Wheels, a non-profit in rural New Brunswick. She added that many rural communities do not have as many mental health and emotional wellness supports as major towns and cities. 

Finding support when and where you need it also happens to be the mission of the Conestoga Entrepreneurship Collective. Pandey learned about the Venture Lab for Tech (VL4T) program from one of her professors.

“Entrepreneurship for me is a way to build something practical and humane by combining my skill in tech and someone who deeply understands the problem from personal experience,” she said.

Pandey added that the VL4T program forced her to step back and look at whether she was truly solving the right problem. Her mentors helped her understand how to run a well-structured customer discovery call to make sure she was asking the right questions.

“I went on a lot of coffee chats with people who were the target audience for Helprr. That helped me fine tune the features in a way that I'm actually building something that's going to help people, not something that I think would help,” Pandey said.

In the later phases of the VL4T program, she was able to build the MVP (minimum viable product) and start building out her go-to-market plan. Pandey added that creating messaging for something very human and emotional was an exciting challenge.

“Venture Lab for Tech helped me get more disciplined about articulating value. Not just why Helprr matters, but how it creates impact and how it could sustainably exist. That shift was huge for me as a first time founder,” she said.