Meet our founders

Before Aligned, Liam was a General Manager at Unobravo, Europe’s largest digital therapy company, where he led the launch of the platform into France. Before that, he ran a network of around 250 therapists across the UK at MANUAL.

Across both roles, one problem kept coming up: no product on the market was trying to predict whether a client and therapist would build a strong working relationship before they met. The industry matched people on practical factors (availability, gender, location) and hoped for the best. Clients would often speak to five or ten therapists before finding someone who felt right, and many gave up along the way, blaming therapy itself rather than a poor match.

Sarah was previously Global Head of Strategy at a leading consulting firm. She has spent over a decade building and running strategy and operations functions, and advising major healthcare companies on strategy and growth.

Her work in the mental health industry revealed an important insight: warped incentives meant that one of the best-established research findings in psychotherapy was being overlooked when it comes to matching clients with the right therapist. The ‘therapeutic alliance’, or relationship between client and therapist, is the single strongest predictor of whether therapy will work. But leading platforms consistently ignored this metric in favour of ‘easier to solve’ factors.