As Australia’s new psychosocial safety laws take effect nationwide, a new class of workplace technology is emerging to help organisations move beyond policy statements and into structured compliance.
From 1 December 2025, psychosocial hazards are formally regulated under Work Health and Safety legislation. Employers must now identify, assess, control and monitor psychological health risks with the same discipline applied to physical safety hazards. The reform shifts psychological health from a cultural conversation to a legal obligation requiring documented oversight and defensible systems.
Sydney-founded ReFresh was built specifically for this moment.
The company has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding led by Black Nova VC, with participation from Archangel Ventures and Antler, to accelerate product development and enterprise rollout ahead of the compliance deadline.
ReFresh was founded by Harrison Kennedy and Taylor Laing after both observed the same pattern across organisations of different sizes and sectors: surveys and wellbeing programs were widely used to demonstrate care, but rarely structured to manage risk in a way that satisfied regulatory expectations.
(Image: Harrison Kennedy and Taylor Laing, Co-founders of ReFresh)
Laing, a data and systems engineer based in Utah, had worked across startups and larger enterprises where engagement tools were often used as proxies for action. Kennedy, a former competitive swimmer and founder of mental health media platform Really Mental, had seen firsthand how intention alone does not create structural accountability.
The platform provides an end-to-end psychosocial compliance system covering confidential risk intake, structured assessments, control tracking, incident recording, evidence management and board-ready reporting. It includes formal psychosocial risk registers, audit workflows, consultation records and governance dashboards, with all key actions versioned and auditable.
Rather than positioning psychosocial health as an HR initiative, ReFresh treats it as core safety infrastructure.
The emergence of ReFresh comes as boards and executives face growing scrutiny over how psychosocial risks are identified and managed. Regulators increasingly expect organisations to demonstrate structured hazard management, not simply reactive wellbeing responses.
Similar enforcement momentum is building in markets such as the United Kingdom and Canada, where workplace stress and psychological injury claims are under heightened regulatory focus. ReFresh is already working with clients across Australia, the UK and Canada, with plans to expand further.
The question for employers is no longer whether psychological health matters, but whether they can evidence how it is managed.
ReFresh is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for that new era of workplace accountability.
