Co-founder and CEO, YourDOST | Founded 2014 | Bengaluru
A swimmer from Bhopal, a few months in Kota
Richa Singh grew up in Bhopal. As a girl she was good at swimming and table tennis, The Week reported in 2016, and she was clearly good at maths and science too, because she set her sights on the IIT entrance exam.
Like lakhs of Indian teenagers, she went to Kota to prepare. She stayed only a few months. YourStory’s HerStory, profiling her in December 2024, recounts what she saw there: students around her buckling under the pressure of the coaching factories. She went home and finished her preparation on her own. She got into IIT Guwahati.
Nothing about this early part of her life suggests a future in psychology. She was, in her own words to The Week, someone with a “hardcore technical background”.
The year everything changed
In 2008, Richa’s final year at IIT Guwahati, a friend from her hostel died by suicide.
The details she has shared over the years are spare and consistent. The young woman had been worried about placements and under heavy stress. She showed no visible signs of depression, and she never spoke to anyone about what she was going through. The campus had counsellors, but students did not go to them. “Students felt that if we consulted them, we would be labelled as crazy,” Richa told HerStory.
In an interview with Feminism in India in 2016, she put it more directly: “I strongly felt that her death could have been avoided had she sought some help.”
She did not start a company that year. She graduated and went to work. But she kept reading about the problem, and the question stayed with her: why would a bright young person in trouble, surrounded by people and with help on campus, tell no one?
Six years in the corporate world
Richa’s first job was at the investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co. There she met Puneet Manuja, an IIT computer science gold medallist who would later spend time at Zynga, IIM Bangalore and McKinsey. Uplers, which profiled the pair in June 2026, notes a detail Puneet brought to the story: despite the gold medal, he had spent his first three months after graduation without a job offer. Both of them knew, first-hand or close-up, what placement pressure does to people.
Richa moved on to the start-up world. The Week names Webfluence among the organisations she worked at, and Uplers reports that she was the first employee at a Bengaluru social media analytics company that was later acquired by Mu Sigma. HerStory adds that she worked in the US and Germany.
Everywhere she went, she saw the same pattern she had seen in the hostel. Colleagues struggled with work pressure and relationships and said nothing. Companies with employee assistance programmes found that hardly anyone used them. Mental health was simply not discussed.
A friend on the internet
Richa and Puneet started shaping an idea while still employed. They had no training in psychology, so they learned the field by talking to experts, Richa told Feminism in India. They pitched the concept at competitions, including ISB’s iDiya. A friend, Satyajeet, wrote the code for the first version: a website where anyone could sign up without giving their name and talk to a qualified expert.
In 2014 they quit their jobs. In December 2014 the site went live as yourdost.com. “Dost” is the Hindi word for friend, and the name was the pitch. If people were too ashamed to walk into a counsellor’s office, perhaps they would type to a friend.
The first office was a flat in Koramangala, Bengaluru, according to The Week. Prakhar Verma, another long-time acquaintance, joined to scale the technology and became co-founder and CTO. The founders put in their own money first. Seed money followed from angel investors, among them redBus founder Phanindra Sama.
The service was free. Users could chat anonymously with psychologists, counsellors, life coaches and career guides, around the clock and in several Indian languages. Experts were tested before they were allowed to take conversations.
It struck a nerve. By early 2016, YourStory cited Inc42 figures of close to 70,000 users, growing about 40% month on month. By that June, Feminism in India reported that more than 2.5 lakh people had reached out, with about 700 one-to-one conversations a day, a team of 22 full-time staff with an average age of about 24, and users mostly between 18 and 35. The problems they brought were exam stress, relationships, careers and the balance between work and life.
“We are confident that technology combined with empathy and right kind of experts will go a long way,” Richa told YourStory in March 2016.
The money question
In June 2016, YourDOST raised a $1.2 million pre-Series A round led by SAIF Partners, which put in $1 million, Entrepreneur India reported. Seven angels came back in, including Phanindra Sama, Paula Mariwala of Seedfund, Aprameya of Taxi4Sure and Gaurav Bhalotia of Flipkart. Earlier seed funding had come to close to $400,000.
“We have spent the last 1.5 years strengthening our product, creating awareness and understanding the needs of users,” Richa said at the time.
But a free service with hundreds of conversations a day has real costs. Counsellors had to be paid. So did a growing team. HerStory describes how the company ran free for almost three years before the founders accepted that it needed revenue to survive and scale.
They tried charging the people who used it. Around 2016 they launched a premium model for individuals: a few free sessions, then paid ones. It did not work. Users wanted the service, but, in HerStory’s words, the founders found “the critical mass was still not ready to pay”.
That was a hard thing to hear for a founder who, only months earlier, had told Feminism in India that the company wanted to focus on consumers and work directly with people rather than corporate organisations.
Changing who pays
The answer came from where the story began: a campus.
In 2016, YourDOST ran a pilot with IIT Madras, HerStory reports. The institute paid; its students used the service. The users were the same young people Richa had wanted to reach since 2008. Only the payer had changed.
The company pivoted to selling to institutions. IITs and IIMs signed on. The pandemic then hit the education business hard, but it opened another door. Employers suddenly had staff working alone at home, under strain, and began looking for support they could offer them. Corporates became a major part of the business.
The online model, which once looked like a compromise, became an advantage. HerStory reports that round-the-clock anonymous online support increased reach roughly tenfold compared with earlier in-person efforts. “We became one of the first startups to offer mental health online,” Richa told the publication.
There was another decision in that period. According to Uplers, by 2016-17 the founders had chosen to make the business sustainable before raising more money, and the company has not raised funding since 2018.
Ten years on
By December 2024, YourDOST worked with more than 500 organisations, corporates and colleges among them, HerStory reported, and said it had reached over 30 lakh people. Its programmes are built around particular groups: women in high-stress roles, new parents, employees going through restructuring or layoffs, and managers learning to spot distress in their teams. It also published research on founders themselves. Its report on the emotional well-being of more than 200 entrepreneurs found that 54% woke up to stress or anxiety almost daily.
Uplers, in mid-2026, reported that YourDOST had been profitable for seven years, with a network of about 1,000 therapists and a service that is free for client employees and their families. It added that the Prime Minister had spoken about the company’s work in Mann Ki Baat.
Richa has not chased a hyper-growth story. “The way Swiggy has scaled may not be the way we are scaling,” she told Uplers. On new investors, she said: “It has to be more than money. What does it bring to the table?” And on AI, which now promises to replace much of what her counsellors do: “Talking to a machine doesn’t make you feel NOT lonely.”
In 2016, looking back on the years in between, she told The Week: “I feel I should have started my company long ago, perhaps in 2010, or immediately after graduating from IIT Guwahati.”
A decade after launch, she still sounds like someone at the start. “I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface,” she told Uplers. “There is so much more to happen.”
If you or someone you know is struggling, India’s Tele-MANAS helpline is free and available round the clock on 14416.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting. Cover photo: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
Sources: The Week (February 2016); YourStory (March 2016); The Better India (March 2016); Feminism in India (June 2016); Entrepreneur India (June 2016); YourStory HerStory (December 2024); Uplers (June 2026)
