Daniel is a confidential AI navigator for men's mental health at work: calm, evidence-based, and private by design. It reaches men earlier, in plain language, inside work, before a quiet struggle becomes a crisis.
A man on your senior team has not slept properly in months. He is short with people in a way he never used to be. He is drinking a little more than he should, working later than he needs to, and telling everyone, including himself, that he is fine.
His performance slips. His manager reads it as a performance problem, because that is what it looks like from the outside, and schedules a difficult conversation. It does not go well. He withdraws further: stops speaking up in meetings, then stops coming to some of them. One Monday he is signed off with stress. The team reorganises around the gap. He does not really come back.
Nobody saw it as mental health until it was a crisis. The system around him was working as designed.
Men are far less likely than women to ask for help, and far more likely to be reached only once things have gone badly wrong. This is the pattern Daniel is built to interrupt.
Employers have spent a decade building mental-health support. The people least likely to use it are men. They self-refer less, disclose less, and present later, often only at the point of crisis.
The stakes are not abstract. Around three in four suicides in the UK are men, and working-age men are among the least likely to seek help in time. Meanwhile the everyday cost (presenteeism, attrition, and managers improvising through conversations they were never equipped for) lands quietly on the business.
As employers extend wellbeing across the whole workforce, the question is not whether you have support for men. It is whether the support you have is one men will actually use.
If you or someone you work with is struggling right now, you can call Samaritans free on 116 123, any time, day or night.
Not a wellbeing app. Not a meditation library. Not a chatbot trained on self-help blogs. The insight is the one behind Vivian, our service for women: detection happens too late and at the wrong layer. By the time anyone names it, the man has been struggling quietly for a year, the manager has been improvising for months, and no one has had a useful conversation.
No individual conversation ever surfaces to the employer. Minimum cohort size is enforced at the database layer. Daniel launches in September 2026.
Daniel runs on the same platform as Vivian, with the same governance. Clinical sign-off is held by our Clinical Director, a registered clinician accountable for clinical governance and safety. 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.
Daniel 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.
Daniel is the men's counterpart to Vivian, our service for menopause and women's mental health at work. The two run on one platform: talktovivian.co.uk.
We are opening design-partner conversations with a small number of HR Directors, Heads of People, and Wellbeing Leads at UK employers who want to reach the men in their workforce before a crisis, and who want to be in the room while it is built.
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