OpenUp

OpenUp is a Dutch platform that brings preventive psychological support inside the workplace, making mental health care as accessible and normalized for employees as a medical insurance benefit. Founded in Amsterdam in 2019, the startup offers one-on-one sessions with certified psychologists, structured group programs on topics from stress management to communication resilience, and digital self-care tools — all purchased by employers as an unlimited employee benefit rather than rationed through the constrained session counts that characterize traditional employee assistance programs. The business case OpenUp presents to HR managers, CHROs, and CEOs is grounded in documented and growing commercial reality. Burnout, stress-related absenteeism, and reduced engagement cost European employers tens of billions of euros annually in direct productivity losses, replacement hiring, and healthcare costs — and the numbers are rising as workforce expectations evolve and as the psychological demands of modern knowledge work intensify. Traditional EAP (employee assistance program) responses — offering a handful of confidential counseling sessions per year, accessed through opaque referral processes that carry significant stigma — have proved inadequate in both utilization rates and impact for the scale of the problem they are meant to address. OpenUp's approach is to intervene much earlier, making psychological support something employees access proactively as a normal part of maintaining their wellbeing, not a crisis resource they reach for reluctantly at their lowest point. The platform's design reflects its preventive philosophy throughout. Employees can book a session with a psychologist within 24 hours, without a referral or a formal diagnosis, in a scheduling experience as simple as a calendar booking. A library of structured group programs enables employees to develop resilience skills, communication habits, and stress management practices in a peer context. Digital tools provide self-directed support between sessions. Employers, meanwhile, receive anonymized aggregate dashboard data showing wellbeing trends across their organization over time, enabling HR teams to identify departments or teams experiencing unusual stress levels and intervene at an organizational level — adjusting workloads, communication practices, or management approaches — without compromising individual employee privacy. OpenUp has built a network of hundreds of psychologists across Europe, offering sessions in more than twenty languages. This multilingual, multinational network makes the platform particularly attractive to international companies with geographically distributed, culturally diverse workforces who need a benefit that is genuinely accessible to every employee regardless of their location or first language. After establishing a strong position in the Netherlands and Belgium, the company has expanded into Germany and the United Kingdom — two of Europe's largest and most commercially significant labor markets — where demand for preventive employee mental health benefits is growing and where an increasing number of large employers are recognizing workplace wellbeing as a competitive differentiator in talent attraction and retention.