Anna Shipman Chief Technology Officer, Kooth

Company

Kooth plc. together with its subsidiaries, provides digital mental health services to children, young people, and adults in the United Kingdom and the US. Kooth’s mission is to create a welcoming space for effective personalized digital mental health care, available to all. Kooth’s mental health application provides free, safe, and anonymous support, enabling users to access content, discussion boards, chat and journal tools, and live counselling sessions. The focus is on early intervention and signposting, rather than later stage clinical support. Today Kooth is the largest and most trusted provider of digital mental healthcare in the UK and is seeing exception growth and success in the USA. The business currently employs 400 staff and is listed on AIM.

Search Background

Kooth has and continues to win major contracts across the US which represents a significant opportunity for the business. More broadly, international expansion is likely to be the focal point of the strategy for the next few years. Penetrating these international markets, localizing, and developing the usability of the product, adapting it for international regulation, and creating an international presence will all be key priorities for Kooth moving forward. For this reason, they were looking to hire a CTO to ensure Kooth delivers a robust and scalable platform.

Requirements

With the complexity of building an exceptional user-experience product that is flexible to integrate into various third parties such as healthcare systems, insurers, businesses, and charities, Kooth required an exceptional CTO who could scale both the platform and engineering teams internationally. This executive would provide guidance and leadership as the company grows and lead all aspects of the company’s technological transformation, including the development of mobile applications and interoperability and connectivity with the US healthcare system such as EMRs and insurers.

Result

Conducting an international search across the UK and US, Erevena introduced Anna Shipman, who was the Technical Director for Consumer Products at the Financial Times where she led an international team of 80 engineers and had led significant and complex company-wide transformations. Previously, at Government Digital Services, she designed a led several significant initiatives, including, launching GOV.UK PaaS, an infrastructure platform to host digital services for the UK government as well as GOV.UK Pay and Register to Vote which served over 30m users.