OpenUp raises €20M to scale employee mental health platform

The Amsterdam startup, which gives employees direct anonymous access to psychologists, lifestyle experts, and financial counsellors through their employer, now serves more than 2,000 organisations across five European markets. Smartfin led the round; Rubio Impact Ventures, which led the 2022 Series A, returned.

The traditional path to professional psychological help in Europe involves a GP referral, a waiting list, and an appointment booked weeks or months in advance.

For the roughly 30 per cent of European workers who report burnout symptoms, that timeline rarely matches the moment of need. OpenUp, an Amsterdam-based mental health platform founded in 2020, is built around a different model: employer-funded, immediately accessible, and anonymous.

The company has raised €20 million to expand that model across Europe.

The round was led by Smartfin, the Belgian growth equity firm founded by Jürgen Ingels, with Rubio Impact Ventures returning as a co-investor. Rubio, a Dutch impact VC, had led OpenUp’s €15 million Series A in October 2022, alongside Achmea Innovation Fund and a group of angel investors including Adriaan Nühn and David Vismans.

The new capital will support European expansion and the recruitment of new expertise. The round brings total disclosed funding to approximately €35 million.

OpenUp was founded by Gijs Coppens, a registered healthcare psychologist who had previously built iPractice, a blended psychological care practice, and Floris Rost van Tonningen. The platform operates as a B2B subscription: employers pay for access and their employees can use it freely, anonymously, and without referrals.

The anonymity is structural, employers receive only aggregate usage data and have no visibility into which individuals are accessing the service, nor what those sessions cover.

The platform offers three types of support: one-to-one sessions with psychologists, physical health specialists, or financial experts; interactive group sessions; and self-guided online courses. All services are available in more than 35 languages.

The company currently operates across five European markets, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium, and serves more than 2,000 organisations including Rabobank, Decathlon, and Deloitte.

The model is deliberately positioned as preventative rather than clinical, filling the space between “nothing is wrong yet” and “I need a referral to a specialist”, a gap that traditional Employee Assistance Programmes have historically handled poorly.

Coppens has previously noted that around two to three per cent of OpenUp users ultimately go on to seek formal clinical care, which he frames as an outcome of early intervention rather than a failure of the platform.

Coppens framed the funding in terms of a structural shift in employer responsibility: “Employers are taking on an ever-greater responsibility in this area, and if policymakers have their way, even a duty of care. At the same time, technology such as AI is fundamentally changing the way we work. That is precisely why organisations need to think about how they support their people through that transition, which is exactly what we do at OpenUp.”

The market context is not subtle. More than 1.6 million Dutch employees, roughly 20 per cent of the workforce, report burnout symptoms. Across Europe the figure approaches 30 per cent, representing around 60 million workers.