$1.3M raised to help employers meet Australia’s new nationwide psychosocial safety obligations
From 1 December 2025, psychosocial hazards are formally regulated nationwide, requiring employers to identify, assess, control, and manage psychosocial risks with the same rigour as physical safety hazards. These changes place new expectations on organisations to demonstrate ongoing oversight, structured risk management, and defensible compliance.
ReFresh, a workplace psychosocial compliance and HR risk management platform, has raised a $1.3M pre-seed round to support organisations responding to Australia’s newly mandatory psychosocial safety obligations under workplace health and safety law.
ReFresh has been built specifically for this regulatory shift, providing organisations with a single system to manage psychosocial compliance across detection, risk assessment, control implementation, ongoing management, and governance reporting.
Founded by Harrison Kennedy and Taylor Laing, ReFresh addresses a long-standing gap between regulatory expectations and the tools organisations have historically relied on, including periodic surveys, manual registers, and reactive wellbeing programs, which were never designed to meet WHS standards for hazard management or governance evidence.
“Psychosocial risk has been discussed for years, but until now it hasn’t been treated as a formal safety obligation with clear accountability,” said Harrison Kennedy, Co-founder of ReFresh. “What the legislation makes clear is that intention is no longer enough. Organisations need systems that allow them to manage psychosocial risk properly and demonstrate that they are doing so.”
Building infrastructure for a new compliance category
ReFresh is designed to manage psychosocial risk as an ongoing compliance function rather than a point-in-time activity. The platform enables organisations to record incidents and confidential risk intake, conduct structured psychosocial risk assessments, apply and track controls, manage evidence and actions over time, and produce board-ready and regulator-ready reporting.
The system includes a formal psychosocial risk register, control and evidence tracking, consultation records, audit workflows, and governance dashboards, with all key actions versioned and auditable to support regulatory scrutiny.
ReFresh is already in use by organisations including Safewill, Amped HQ, and Nakatomi, and is supported by partnerships with Deel, Sonder, Matched, and Humn, helping organisations connect psychosocial risk management with appropriate support and response pathways where required.
Taylor Laing, co-founder of ReFresh, said the platform was built in response to repeated failures he observed across workplaces of all sizes.
“Everywhere I worked, the same tools were used to demonstrate care, regardless of whether they actually reduced risk or protected people,” Laing said. “ReFresh was built to move beyond box-ticking and give organisations a practical way to understand psychosocial risk early and manage it responsibly.”
Momentum and market validation
The $1.3M pre-seed round was led by Australian venture capital firm Black Nova VC, with participation from Archangel VC, and Antler following on from its initial investment, alongside strategic angel investors. The capital will be used to accelerate product development, expand enterprise adoption, and support organisations navigating the new regulatory environment.
ReFresh’s emergence comes as boards, executives, and WHS leaders face increasing scrutiny around how psychosocial risks are identified, controlled, and monitored, with expectations now extending beyond policy statements to demonstrable systems and evidence.
Similar expectations are already emerging and expanding in other markets like Canada and the United Kingdom, where the Health and Safety Executive has increased enforcement focus on work-related stress, bullying, and harassment, and where employers are expected to demonstrate proactive risk management rather than reactive wellbeing initiatives. Recent HSE guidance has reinforced that psychosocial hazards must be assessed, controlled, and reviewed as part of core health and safety duties, particularly in high-risk sectors such as professional services, technology, healthcare, and education.
ReFresh has been built specifically for this regulatory shift, providing organisations with a single system to manage psychosocial compliance across detection, risk assessment, control implementation, ongoing management, and governance reporting.
Within its first five months since inception, ReFresh partnered with Deel, one of the world’s fastest-growing global payroll and HR platforms with a recent valuation of $17.3 billion USD, alongside employee assistance provider Sonder.
“Psychosocial safety is no longer a soft issue,” Kennedy said. “It is a governance issue, and the expectations of organisations have changed permanently.”
About ReFresh
ReFresh is an end-to-end psychosocial compliance and HR risk management system that helps organisations detect, assess, control, manage, and govern psychosocial risk through structured workflows, evidence management, audits, and board-ready reporting.
Founded in Australia, ReFresh works with organisations across multiple industries and partners with leading providers to support responsible, evidence-based psychosocial risk management aligned with workplace health and safety obligations. ReFresh is being used by clients in the UK, Canada, Australia and expanding into new markets in 2026.
