10 years of Welltory: surviving the SaaS meat-grinder, rejecting "healthism," and the fight for agency

This May marks exactly ten years since we released our first iOS app in 2016. I’m forty-three. That means ten years of my life have been this company. If I look back at my first startup at twenty-six, I’ve spent seventeen years in innovation. More than half of my adult life—at least since I became conscious of my own path—has been dedicated to this.

The strangest part is that I never actually planned to work in health.

My career began in information security. I chose it at sixteen because it was a completely new frontier. I moved fast, but I quickly hit a professional realization that shaped everything to follow: once you build the perfect technical architecture, the primary vulnerability in any system is always the human being.

To be an effective CISO (Chief Information Security Officer), you have to become a behavioral psychologist. I remember the immense effort of training people to simply lock their computers when they stepped away. It sounds trivial, but it’s a massive hurdle in human psychology.

Only now do I see how much that was a rehearsal for public health. It is the exact same problem: there is no immediate reward, you are protecting against catastrophic events in a distant future that may not even happen, and because motivation is naturally low, you have to change the environment rather than just commanding the person to "do better."

When I left InfoSec for startups, I had no idea I would spend the rest of my life doing the same thing—trying to influence human behavior for a safer future, just for biology instead of servers.

Escaping the SaaS meat-grinder

I came to Welltory through a profound crisis of meaning. By my thirties, I was tired of the "B2B SaaS" machine—a cycle that often feels utterly disconnected from real human value.

Think about the standard venture cycle: a talented team builds something useful, they package it as a SaaS, go through an accelerator, and investors pour in money while grooming them for a buyout. Often, the early "traction" is just other accelerator alumni buying the product. The company looks successful on paper, a corporation buys it, the VCs and the corporate execs get their bonuses, and the product is quietly shelved or dies a slow death inside the corporation.

Capital moves, but the customer’s life doesn’t improve. It leaves a bitter aftertaste of meaningless motion.

Welltory began with a different question: what is actually worth doing? We all know the answer. It’s what we wish for everyone at every milestone: Happiness and Health.

I looked at the data and saw that while other industries had been transformed by feedback loops, health was lagging behind. We had a metric—Heart Rate Variability (HRV)—and a clear problem: the crushing volume of stress modern life throws at us.

The mavericks and the nerds

We were incredibly naïve back then. We didn't know how hard it would be to bridge the gap between hard science and consumer habits. But we survived because of the people we brought together.

Here is an amazing fact: the iOS and Android developers who pushed that very first release in May 2016 are still with us today. Our CPO has been here for almost a decade. The designer who created our iconic "liquid" interface—the fluid animation that represents the state of your nervous system—is still here, leading our design team. Our Lead Scientist, the one who built our proprietary science from the ground up, is the exact same person.

In the tech industry, a ten-year tenure is almost unheard of. But people come to Welltory—and stay for five, seven, ten years—because of meaning and ethics.

Our team is a mix of top-tier professionals who reached a point in their careers where they demanded purpose, and brilliant mavericks who simply don't fit into standard corporate structures. For a long time, I was incredibly proud of the fact that the number of PhDs in our company was roughly equal to the number of people without any higher education at all. We’ve never cared about your pedigree. We only care how deeply you can dig into a problem.

If I had to define our culture, it rests on two pillars: obsessive tenacity and intellectual rigor. We are incredibly different people, but we are united by a shared perfectionism and an absolute refusal to compromise our principles. Working alongside people who truly understand you is a rare, incredible feeling.

Science vs. the market

But being science-obsessed in a consumer market is painful. A perfect example is sleep phases. We fought so hard against adding sleep phases to the app. From a scientific standpoint, wearable data for sleep phases is notoriously inaccurate and, frankly, not very actionable. We tried to hold the line and do things the "right" way.

But users buried us in demands for it. Everyone else had sleep phases; why didn't we? Eventually, we surrendered. We learned a humbling lesson: market perception is a reality you have to design for, even when that perception is built on wellness myths. Our compromise now? We give people the familiar features they expect, but we place the actual physiological truth right next to it, hoping the two eventually connect in the user’s mind.

The crash that changed everything

That tenacity finally paid off in a way that nearly broke us.

In late 2021, we released our core version—the one that ultimately made us successful. We were growing at 30% month-over-month. But during the release, we made a tiny, catastrophic mistake in the App Store: instead of a phased rollout, we hit the button for a 100% rollout.

A tsunami of users hit us. Our servers started melting. Our CTO practically lived in the office; instead of letting him sleep, we were calling a massage therapist to work on his back while he kept coding to keep the infrastructure alive. Everything was glitching, things were breaking left and right.

But here is the crazy part: people kept buying.

Despite the bugs, despite the crashes, they saw the value and they supported us. They didn’t let the team break. That was the moment I realized that we weren't just building an app anymore; we had built something people genuinely needed.

The InfoSec loop closes

Today, 17 million people have trusted us with their health data.

As a former InfoSec expert, that number terrifies me. I know that any growing, centralized system eventually becomes fragile. A data breach would destroy our company.

So, we are going back to my roots: we are changing the architecture. We are moving further away from directly handling user data and shifting the heavy calculations directly onto the users' devices. We are striving for decentralization. We are building safety into the very architecture of the product, because that is the only way to truly protect people.

Beyond "healthism" and the fight for agency

Because we work only for the user, we have to stay independent. This means we often hit the walls of mistrust that the healthcare industry has built for decades.

We are entering a new era where we stop pretending our users are just "relatively healthy people" looking to optimize their fitness. The reality is that more than half of people over thirty-five live with chronic conditions.

The turning point for our company’s transformation happened during an interview I had with a user. He was a classic high-achiever: an active B2B partnerships executive, an athlete, a guy who ran his life at full speed. Then, he got Long COVID.

Suddenly, his world was destroyed. He could barely sit at a computer for one or two hours a day. A 30-minute walk became a grueling ordeal. He told me how impossibly hard it was to find reliable information on how to pull himself out of that dark place. He used Welltory to find his baseline, to pace himself, and to face his new biological reality.

Today, he has clawed his way back to working five hours a day. He transitioned from full disability back to being a capable, active person, even if it's on a half-time basis. Hearing him say, "It gave me my life back," left an indelible mark on me.

The prevailing culture in digital health is "Healthism"—the toxic idea that health is entirely a matter of personal discipline, and if you are sick or tired, it’s a moral failing. Wearables scold you for not hitting 10,000 steps, ignoring the fact that your nervous system might be completely depleted.

We are rejecting Healthism. We are moving into medicine, supporting people with energy-limiting conditions, autoimmune diseases, and chronic fatigue.

This is where AI changes the game for us. We aren't using AI to be a stricter coach. We are using AI to translate complex data into narratives that remove guilt. If you have no energy, your data should validate your biological reality, not demand more discipline. We want to give people insights that help them cope, without the heavy burden of blame.

An unequal fight

It is an unequal fight. There is too much in this modern world arrayed against our mental and physical well-being. But it is a fight worth picking, even if you know a "final victory" isn't the point.

When a user writes to us saying, "I thought your app was wrong, but I went to the doctor and you caught something life-threatening," or when someone like that executive tells us we helped him get his life back—that is what keeps us going.

I can promise our users one thing: we will always be on your side. We will do everything possible, and impossible, to ensure nobody can force us to act against your interests.

I am deeply grateful to our users. You allow us to live a life of meaning. It has been difficult, often at the very edge of our limits, but it is a life that matters.

Thank you for these ten years.

— Jane