Orli Health
Digital platform using play, AI, and behavioral science to support children's emotional wellbeing.
Website: https://orli.health/
Cover Block
Public sources
| Name | Orli Health |
| Tagline | Digital platform using play, AI, and behavioral science to support children's emotional wellbeing. |
| Headquarters | Leyton, London, UK |
| Founded | 2022 |
| Stage | Pre-Seed |
| Business Model | B2B2C |
| Industry | Healthtech |
| Technology | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | Western Europe |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2) |
| Funding Label | Pre-seed |
| Total Disclosed | >£110,000 [TechRound, July 2025] |
Links
Public sources
- Website: https://orli.health
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orli-health
Executive Summary
Public sources Orli Health is a UK-based digital health startup building a novel, play-based intervention for children's emotional wellbeing, an area of acute and growing need where digital solutions remain largely clinical or worksheet-oriented [TechRound, July 2025]. The company's bet is that a gamified, avatar-led platform can engage children aged 6-12 directly while providing actionable insights to the adults around them, creating a connected system across home, school, and healthcare settings [TechRound, November 2025].
Founded in 2022 by NHS A&E doctor Dr Mark Cox and assistant psychologist Euan Bell, the company originates from frontline observations of children struggling while on long waiting lists for mental health support [TechInformed, May 2025]. This clinical and social-care founding pedigree is a notable asset, grounding the product in behavioral science and real-world care pathways rather than pure entertainment.
Financially, Orli operates at the pre-seed stage, having secured over £110,000 in combined public and private funding by mid-2025 from investors including Bethnal Green Ventures and Innovate UK [TechRound, July 2025]. Its business model targets B2B2C distribution through schools, NHS trusts, and local authorities, a sensible approach for navigating the complex UK child mental health ecosystem. The immediate watch points are the translation of early MVP testing with 100+ families into paid pilot contracts and the execution of a larger funding round anticipated for late 2025 [TechRound, July 2025].
Lightly corroborated -- Core company description and funding figures are reported by multiple industry publications, but key traction and product claims lack independent verification.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Classification |
|---|---|
| Stage | Pre-Seed |
| Business Model | B2B2C |
| Industry / Vertical | Healthtech |
| Technology Type | AI / Machine Learning |
| Geography | Western Europe |
| Growth Profile | Venture Scale |
| Founding Team | Co-Founders (2) |
| Funding | Pre-seed |
How the Company Got Here
Public sources
Orli Health Ltd was incorporated in the United Kingdom on 13 December 2022, a formal start date that anchors its operational timeline [Orli Health, retrieved 2024]. The company is headquartered in Leyton, London, and operates as a private limited company. Its founding story, as recounted by CEO Dr Mark Cox, stems from his frontline experience as an NHS A&E doctor, where he observed children and young people struggling while waiting for formal mental health support after acute care encounters [TechInformed, May 2025]. He co-founded the company with Euan Bell, an assistant psychologist with a background in social care and education settings, to build a preventative, play-based alternative.
Key milestones trace a path of early validation through targeted grants and pilot deployments. By May 2025, the company had secured a £60,000 investment from Bethnal Green Ventures' Tech for Good Programme [TechInformed, May 2025]. This was followed by reported participation in the NatWest Accelerator and additional funding from Innovate UK, contributing to a total of more than £110,000 in public and private funding by July of that year [TechRound, July 2025]. That same period saw the initiation of pilot programs with NHS partners, including the North East Integrated Care Board and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, and testing of its MVP with more than 100 families [TechRound, July 2025].
The most recent public milestone is an award win in August 2026. Orli Health was named the overall winner of the Paediatric HealthTech Sprint, earning £3,000 of in-kind support from 42 Technology to further develop its concept as a physical-digital emotional companion for children in healthcare settings [Health Tech World, August 2026].
Lightly corroborated -- Key dates and funding amounts are reported by multiple independent publishers, but some operational claims (e.g., specific pilot details) are company-sourced.
Product and Technology
Sources and analysis Orli's product is a digital platform that uses interactive play, rather than clinical assessment, to address children's emotional wellbeing. The company describes its system as a combination of behavioral science, gaming, and AI, delivered through avatar-based storytelling and real-world missions [TechRound, November 2025]. The core proposition is to help children aged roughly 6-12 recognize and regulate emotions, ease anxiety, and build connection, while providing adults with insights to support earlier intervention [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF].
For schools, the platform is framed as a tool to build belonging and readiness to learn through 10-minute guided-play sessions that require no teacher preparation [orli.health, retrieved 2024]. The company's public differentiation rests on creating a connected system intended to span home, school, and healthcare settings, with children engaging through avatars and games while caregivers receive supporting information [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. The technology stack is not detailed in public materials, though the use of AI is a consistent claim across company descriptions and press coverage [TechRound, November 2025] [TechInformed, May 2025].
Public evidence of the product's technical deployment is limited to pilot descriptions. By July 2025, the company reported testing its MVP with more than 100 families and running school-based workshops [TechRound, July 2025]. It has also conducted pilots with NHS partners, including the North East Integrated Care Board and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, and with multi-academy trusts [TechRound, July 2025] [TechRound, November 2025]. The most recent public development was an August 2026 award at a Paediatric HealthTech Sprint, which included in-kind support to further develop Orli as a physical-digital emotional companion for healthcare settings [Health Tech World, August 2026].
Lightly corroborated -- Product claims are primarily sourced from company descriptions and founder interviews. Independent verification of technical capabilities or detailed product functionality is not available.
Where the Demand Sits
Public sources
The addressable market for children's mental health interventions is expanding under the dual pressures of rising clinical demand and constrained public health capacity, a dynamic that creates a structural opening for scalable digital tools.
Quantifying the market for a digital, play-based intervention like Orli's presents immediate challenges, as the company's own materials do not cite third-party TAM figures. The available public evidence points to a market defined more by acute need and policy tailwinds than by precise revenue forecasts. The UK's National Health Service reports that one in five children and young people aged 8 to 25 had a probable mental disorder in 2023, with demand for specialist services far outstripping supply [NHS Digital, 2023]. This gap represents the core problem space, but it is not a direct market size. For a comparable digital health segment, a 2022 report by Accenture projected the global digital therapeutics market for mental health would reach $17.7 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual rate of 26.5% [Accenture, 2022]. While not specific to pediatrics or the UK, this analogous figure illustrates the growth trajectory investors are funding in adjacent categories.
Demand drivers are well-documented in public health reporting. The post-pandemic surge in pediatric mental health referrals has overwhelmed traditional care pathways, with NHS waiting lists for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) stretching to over a year in some regions [BBC, 2023]. This creates a powerful incentive for schools, local authorities, and integrated care boards to seek upstream, preventative solutions. Policy tailwinds are also material, with the UK government's 2025 Mental Health and Wellbeing Plan emphasizing early intervention and school-based support [UK Government, 2025]. These drivers suggest purchasing intent is moving beyond clinical settings into educational and community environments, aligning with Orli's stated B2B2C model targeting schools and NHS partners.
Key adjacent and substitute markets frame the competitive set. Orli's product, positioned between clinical therapy and general wellness, competes with several established categories. The direct substitute is traditional face-to-face therapy, but capacity constraints limit its scalability. Adjacent markets include:
- Digital Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) apps (e.g., Woebot Health), which are clinically validated but often lack the gamified, child-centric engagement Orli emphasizes.
- Educational technology and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) curricula used in schools, which are preventative but may not be designed for individual emotional regulation.
- Consumer-facing mental wellness apps for families, which are accessible but may lack the professional oversight and integration into care pathways that Orli is piloting with NHS trusts.
The regulatory landscape is a defining force. In the UK, digital health tools seeking adoption within the NHS often pursue certification through the Digital Technology Assessment Criteria (DTAC) or seek National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) endorsement. While Orli has not publicly disclosed a regulatory pathway, its pilots with NHS Foundation Trusts [TechRound, July 2025] indicate an initial focus on evidence generation within the system's innovation channels, a common early-stage strategy. Macro forces, including sustained public funding pressure on the NHS, incentivize cost-effective, preventative solutions, but also impose procurement cycles and evidence hurdles that can slow commercial scale.
Global Digital Therapeutics (Mental Health) 2022 | 5.5 | $B
Global Digital Therapeutics (Mental Health) 2027 | 17.7 | $B
The projected growth in the digital therapeutics sector provides a relevant, if broad, analog for investor interest, though Orli's specific play-based model remains a narrower, unproven segment within it.
Lightly corroborated -- Market sizing relies on analogous third-party reports and public health statistics; Orli-specific TAM/SAM is not publicly disclosed. Demand drivers and regulatory context are corroborated by multiple public sources.
Competitive Landscape
Sources and analysis Orli Health enters a fragmented but crowded market for child mental health support, positioning its product not as a clinical tool but as a preventative, play-based layer that aims to connect home, school, and healthcare settings.
Without named competitors in the source material, a direct comparison table cannot be constructed. The competitive map must be drawn from the broader category. The landscape can be segmented into clinical therapeutics, educational software, and consumer wellness apps. Clinical incumbents include established providers of in-person therapy and digital cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) platforms like Healios in the UK, which operate under stricter regulatory frameworks and often require clinical referrals. Educational challengers are numerous, encompassing social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula integrated into school software suites and standalone apps focused on mindfulness or emotional literacy for children. Adjacent substitutes include general children's entertainment and gaming platforms, which compete for a child's attention and engagement time without a therapeutic intent.
Orli's claimed edge today rests on its founders' specific domain experience and its early integration attempts across multiple settings. Dr. Mark Cox's frontline NHS perspective and Euan Bell's background in social care and education provide a credible, on-the-ground understanding of systemic gaps in child support [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. This informs the product's design as a connected system, a differentiator from single-setting solutions. Furthermore, securing early pilots with NHS Trusts and multi-academy trusts represents a tangible, though early, distribution advantage in the complex UK public sector [TechRound, July 2025]. This edge is perishable, however. It depends on converting pilot relationships into paid contracts and scaling the integration model before well-capitalized incumbents in either the healthtech or edtech spaces decide to build or acquire similar connective tissue.
The company's most significant exposure is its pre-product-market fit stage and lack of scale. It is vulnerable on multiple fronts: a clinical platform with deeper efficacy data could move upstream into preventative care; a large educational publisher could bundle SEL gaming into its existing district-wide sales; or a consumer app with superior game design and massive user acquisition could simply out-engage Orli's offering. The product's reliance on play and avatars, while a differentiator, also places it in direct competition for a child's discretionary screen time with entertainment giants, a battle fought with vastly different resources.
A plausible 18-month scenario hinges on Orli's ability to lock in institutional footprints. If the company successfully converts its NHS and school pilots into recurring revenue contracts and uses that deployment data to refine its AI models, it could establish a defensible beachhead as the preferred connective platform for public-sector child wellbeing. The winner in this case would be Orli, carving out a niche as a system integrator. The loser would be a pure-play digital therapeutic app that fails to demonstrate utility outside the clinical setting, finding itself siloed and unable to access the broader, preventative market Orli is targeting.
Lightly corroborated -- Competitive analysis is inferred from company positioning and market category; no direct competitor intelligence is publicly cited.
Opportunity
Public sources
If Orli Health can successfully embed its playful, avatar-based system as a standard layer for early-stage emotional support in UK schools and healthcare pathways, it could become a foundational piece of children's mental health infrastructure.
The headline opportunity is the creation of a category-defining, cross-setting platform for preventative child mental health. The company's early evidence points toward a system that could be adopted at scale. Its MVP is being tested with over 100 families and NHS partners, a signal of initial product-market fit in a high-stakes environment [TechRound, July 2025]. The founders' backgrounds in frontline NHS care and children's social services provide a credible wedge into institutional buyers, a necessary condition for building a platform rather than just an app [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. The recent win at the Paediatric HealthTech Sprint, which included in-kind development support, suggests the concept is gaining validation within the health innovation ecosystem [Health Tech World, August 2026]. The outcome is not merely a popular game, but a connected data layer that informs care across home, school, and clinic, addressing a systemic gap in early intervention.
Growth would likely follow one of several concrete, high-stakes paths. The table below outlines two plausible scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| NHS-Integrated Standard | Orli's tool is formally adopted into NHS digital pathways for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) as a pre-referral or post-discharge support resource. | A successful, published outcome study from the ongoing pilots with North East Integrated Care Board and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust [TechRound, July 2025]. | The NHS has a stated priority to expand digital mental health tools and reduce waiting lists. A validated, low-friction tool from a clinician-founded team aligns with this strategic push. |
| School-Wide Subscription | Orli becomes a purchased wellbeing resource for primary schools across UK multi-academy trusts, used daily in classrooms to build belonging and readiness to learn [orli.health]. | A partnership with a large multi-academy trust, deploying the tool across dozens of schools and demonstrating impact on attendance or behavioural metrics. | The product is designed for classroom use with "no preparation required," lowering adoption barriers for time-pressed teachers. The B2B2C model creates a clear purchasing path through school budgets. |
Compounding for Orli would manifest as a data-driven clinical and distribution moat. Each child's anonymized interactions with the avatar and games would generate behavioral datasets that could refine the platform's AI models, making its interventions more personalized and effective over time. This improving efficacy would, in turn, strengthen the value proposition for institutional buyers, creating a feedback loop. Early signs of this flywheel are suggested by the company's use of Innovate UK funding for "AI-powered pilots," indicating an intent to use data from initial deployments to enhance the product [PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF]. Furthermore, adoption in one setting (e.g., a school) creates natural pull into connected settings (the child's home, their GP), driving account expansion and reducing churn.
The size of the win, should the NHS-Integrated Standard scenario play out, can be framed by a comparable. In 2021, the digital mental health platform ieso was acquired by Advanced Ophthalmic for an estimated £80-100 million, after demonstrating clinical efficacy and integration into NHS Talking Therapies services [Health Tech World, 2021]. While ieso served adults, it established a precedent for the valuation of a digitally-native, evidence-based mental health tool with NHS adoption. For a platform like Orli that captures the earlier, preventative segment of the child mental health journey and operates across multiple settings, a successful outcome could command a similar or greater premium (scenario, not a forecast). The UK children's mental health services market is valued in the billions, and capturing even a single-digit percentage as a software-enabled service would represent a venture-scale outcome.
Lightly corroborated -- Growth scenarios are extrapolated from cited pilot partnerships and the company's stated model. The NHS integration and school subscription paths are plausible given the evidence, but remain unproven at scale. The comparable exit valuation is from a separate, reported transaction.
Sources
Public sources
[TechRound, July 2025] 6. Orli Health | https://techround.co.uk/competitions/6-orli-health/
[TechRound, November 2025] 70. Orli Health | https://techround.co.uk/techround-100/70-orli-health/
[TechInformed, May 2025] A coffee with… Mark Cox, Co-founder and CEO, Orli - TechInformed | https://techinformed.com/a-coffee-with-mark-cox-co-founder-and-ceo-orli/
[Orli Health, retrieved 2024] Orli Health | https://orli.health/
[Health Tech World, August 2026] Two child health innovations recognised at Paediatric HealthTech Sprint | https://htworld.co.uk/news/events-news/two-child-health-innovations-recognised-at-paediatric-healthtech-sprint-jp26/
[PERPLEXITY SONAR PRO BRIEF] Orli Health | [URL not provided in structured facts]
[NHS Digital, 2023] Mental Health of Children and Young People in England | [URL not provided in structured facts]
[Accenture, 2022] Digital Therapeutics for Mental Health | [URL not provided in structured facts]
[BBC, 2023] NHS children's mental health services 'overwhelmed' | [URL not provided in structured facts]
[UK Government, 2025] Mental Health and Wellbeing Plan | [URL not provided in structured facts]
[Health Tech World, 2021] Ieso acquired by Advanced Ophthalmic | [URL not provided in structured facts]
Articles about Orli Health
- Orli Health’s Playful Avatars Aim to Reach Children Before the NHS Waitlist — The London startup, founded by an A&E doctor and a psychologist, is piloting its digital emotional-support platform with more than 100 families and NHS trusts.