The round was led by Black Nova Venture Capital, supported by follow-on investments from Antler and Archangel Ventures.
The raise is timely. It closed a fortnight before People at Work, the free survey that around 5,000 organisations and 160,000 workers have used to assess psychosocial risk since 2020, is shut down after Safe Work Australia and state regulators claimed it no longer reflects current requirements.
Harrison Kennedy and Taylor Laing founded ReFresh in 2025 and built it from opposite sides of the Pacific after a mutual contact introduced them. The startup was six months old, with employees, a pre-Seed round in December that year and customers onboarded before they met in person.
ReFresh has clients in financial services, government and ASX-listed tech companies. It’s now raised more than $4 million.
For Kennedy, the CEO, the mission is personal. He was a competitive swimmer and international model in his teens, who developed anxiety. So aged 19 he built a mental health media platform, Really Mental, that was backed by Amazon and helped millions of people. He founded ReFresh at 23.
“Really Mental taught me that awareness is not the same thing as change,” he said Kennedy.
“You can reach 25 million people with a message about mental health and change nothing about the job that made them unwell. The design of the work is what does the damage, and an organisation only changes the design of work when it has a system that makes the risk visible and holds someone accountable for it.”
The issue at stake is that every employer must identify psychosocial hazards at work and address them.
Kennedy explained that ReFresh gives them organisations a single system to identify them, assess and manage the risk, and maintain inspection-ready evidence in the business.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
Kennedy warns that regulators are taking a closure look at how workplaces are addressing their responsibilities after mental health conditions became the costliest category of workers compensation claims nationally, at 4x the average claim.
“Physical safety took three decades to get its infrastructure, and it changed how millions of people go to work and come home again,” he said.
“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.”
Decidr AI’s head of people and culture, Bianca Hill, is a fan of the platform.
“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.
“That is what a system serving people, rather than the other way around, looks like.”
Black Nova managing partner Matt Browne also knows the sector well, having cofounded Donesafe. He’s an advisor to ReFresh, alongside Jane Martino, cofounder of mental health platform Smiling Mind, and saw how it addresses issues that previously fell through the cracks.
“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.
“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.”
As well as addressing the key issues, ReFresh also tracks regulatory change across Australia’s nine work health and safety jurisdictions and updates the requirements each control is mapped to. Upgrading that side of compliance and understanding is where much of the funding will go.
Cofounder Taylor Laing led engineering at Insite AI and 1800 Contacts, and is based in the US.
He makes the point that while compliance is easy, trust is hard to establish.
“The system asks a person to report the worst things happening to them at work, and asks their employer to hold that information responsibly,” he 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.”
Antler partner Michael Kron said 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.
“Harrison and Taylor bring an unusual velocity and obsession in building the system that helps enterprises comply and bringing it to market. They are already on track to being the default system for employee health and safety compliance.”
