Decades of experience. Built brand new.
Soluna comes from Kooth, a digital mental health company with more than 25 years of clinical research and real-world results behind it. When California set out to build free mental health support for every young person in the state, Kooth didn't adapt an old model — it built something new, from the ground up, specifically for the young people who'd use it.
How we got here
Kooth was founded in 2001 in the UK with one goal: to make mental health support easier to reach, especially for young people navigating it for the first time. Over the next two decades, that work grew into one of the most-studied digital mental health platforms in the world, backed by more than 40 independent peer-reviewed studies and accredited by URAC in the US.
Kooth brought that model to the US in 2021. Soon after, California launched the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) — part of Governor Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health, a multi-billion dollar effort to transform how the state supports children, youth, and families — and set out to build free mental health support for every young person in the state. Kooth won the contract to build a platform, working in collaboration with the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) to design something specifically for young people.
That work became Soluna — part of a first-in-the-nation initiative — which launched in January 2024 for the 6 million young people ages 13 to 25 across California, and has since expanded to reach young people in New Jersey and Michigan.
The next chapter brings Soluna back to where Kooth started: the platform is on track to launch in the UK this fall, bringing everything learned building for millions of young people in the US back to where it all began.
Our mission
No young person should have to earn their way to support.
That’s the standard we hold ourselves to: free of cost, free of waitlists, and free of judgement. We offer support built around a young person’s actual life, not the systems that are often barriers to care.
Why we do this
Too many young people go without mental health support — not because they don't need it, but because of cost, waitlists, insurance, stigma, or just not knowing where to start. Closing that gap for every young person is the problem Kooth has spent two decades solving for.
The need is real, and so is the impact: an independent evaluation by Northwestern University's Lab for Scalable Mental Health found that young people using Soluna experienced significant reductions in distress within a month, with those improvements holding steady three months later.
That's the difference accessible support can make when it's built to reach young people, rather than waiting for them to find their way to it.
What makes Soluna different
Everything about Soluna is built to meet young people where they already are, not where a traditional health system assumes they'll show up.
Clinically: drop-in coaching, no required diagnosis or referral, and real human practitioners — never bots — instead of appointments and waitlists.
In the interface: a peer community and self-guided tools built to feel familiar, closer to the apps young people already use than a clinical portal, but pre-moderated and grounded in evidence rather than trends.
In the format: entirely digital, available on a young person's own schedule, with product decisions shaped in part by the Young Adult Ambassadors who use it every day.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Kooth also operates Qwell, a digital mental health platform for adults, alongside other services worldwide. Soluna is Kooth's platform built specifically for young people.
Yes. Soluna is Kooth’s mental health platform for teens and young adults. It’s currently offered to young people in California, New Jersey, Michigan, and the UK — powered by the same clinical model and research Kooth has built over more than two decades.
