Shreyas Parab ’18 Tackles Mental Health with Innovative Startup

At 16, Shreyas was not unfamiliar with entrepreneurship, having already started two companies and successfully exiting one of them to a million-dollar education company, but this was a challenge unlike any he had ever faced before.

Shreyas was teamed up with four strangers from across the world and told to develop a startup that would address one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The team consisted of people from five different countries, cultures, languages, and ages, sharing their passion for sustainable development. With members from New Zealand, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Namibia, Shreyas’ team hailed from almost every continent and boasted a mean age of 22. They found themselves overcoming many barriers to work together, including culture and language. Even small details such as scheduling a meeting meant working across 4 different time zones. In fact, for almost 4 months, Shreyas would wake up at 4:30 in the morning to meet with his team and then go to school.

Through Young Sustainable Impact, Shreyas and his team were flown out to Oslo, Norway in August for two weeks of intensive startup incubating. At the end of the two weeks, they pitched to everyone and anyone in Norway with an active interest in impact investing and social development. The company they are working on is called “Mynd.ly”, which seeks to solve the inequity in mental health support for youth across the globe and amplify the therapy process for both the client and the therapist. Currently, they are raising a pre-seed round in order to develop the Minimum Viable Prototype and launch a pilot program for universities’ mental health centers on campus. The feedback and response they received from Norwegian investors will keep them busy as they negotiate terms of investment and finalize partnerships, but they hope to launch the product by February of this year.

After accepting a Fellowship at StartUpHealth, a NYC-based company looking to accelerate digital health companies through investment and mentorship, Shreyas says he was motivated to use “tech for good”. “I spent my whole summer working with, learning about, and helping over 199 companies that were making a real impact in the world: making patients’ lives better, making health accessible, and changing the face of healthcare. I decided that it was time for me to do the same,” he says. “Mental health affects every single one of us, we are all human. It is not necessarily the easiest challenge to take on, but I think that’s what makes it so worthwhile. My team and I want to make mental health support affordable, effective, and accessible anywhere and anytime and I promise you, we will do exactly that.”