I didn't build this because I'm a therapist. I built it because I'm a client.

I grew up in a family where there was no money for help and no language for what we were going through. My grandfather died by suicide. My father struggled with alcoholism and attempted suicide during the worst of it, and my uncle was found dead in his sleep at the age of 40 after being sober for one year following years of alcoholism. In the part of India where I grew up, therapy wasn't an option. It didn't exist in our world. You just carried it.

I carried anger and depression for years. Then my son was born with a congenital heart defect. Two open-heart surgeries before he turned two. Watching him fight for his life put everything into perspective. I didn't want to pass down the same cycles I grew up with. I wanted to be a better father and a better partner. My wife Abby was the one who encouraged me to try therapy, and gave me the confidence that going doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It just means you're willing to grow.

It changed my life. And one of the biggest things therapy taught me was to stop running from my past and start learning from it. I never used to talk about any of this. Now I understand that owning your story is how you stop repeating it.

But I was terrible at therapy. I'd walk out of a session feeling like something clicked, and by Wednesday I couldn't remember what we talked about. Between sessions I'd have moments of real clarity, real emotion, and no way to capture them. By the time I sat back down the next week, I'd lost half of what mattered.

Then I looked at the other side. My therapist was spending her evenings on documentation and fighting insurance companies over reimbursements, sometimes getting clawed back months after being paid. Over a decade of this. And she's far from the only one. Half of licensed therapists leave the field within five years, not because they stop caring, but because the system wears them down.

There are millions of people around the world like the kid I was. No access, no language, no path to help. And in the places where help does exist, the therapists providing it are burning out faster than they can be replaced.

So I built Therapy Companion. For the client who forgets what they felt on Tuesday by the time Thursday's session comes. For the therapist who chose this work to help people heal, not to spend their nights on paperwork and prior auths. And eventually, for the communities around the world where therapy was never an option at all.

A therapist helped me break a cycle that spanned generations. I'm building this to make sure they can keep doing that for others.