ReFresh Raises $1.3M as Psychosocial Hazards Become a Formal Workplace Safety Obligation in Australia

As Australia’s workplace safety framework expands to formally regulate psychological health, a new category of compliance technology is emerging to help employers meet rising regulatory expectations.

Sydney-founded platform ReFresh has raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding to support organisations navigating Australia’s newly mandatory psychosocial safety obligations under workplace health and safety law. The round was led by Black Nova VC, with participation from Archangel Ventures and Antler.

From 1 December 2025, psychosocial hazards are regulated nationwide, requiring employers to identify, assess, control, and manage psychological health risks with the same discipline applied to physical safety hazards. The changes place new expectations on organisations to demonstrate ongoing oversight, structured risk management, and defensible compliance.

Closing the compliance gap

While psychosocial risk has been discussed for years, most organisations lacked tools designed to manage it as a formal safety obligation. Surveys, manual registers, and reactive wellbeing initiatives were never built to meet WHS standards for hazard management, governance evidence, or regulatory scrutiny.

ReFresh was built specifically to address this gap.

Founded by Harrison Kennedy and Taylor Laing, the platform provides organisations with a single system to manage psychosocial compliance across detection, risk assessment, control implementation, ongoing management, and board-level reporting. The system includes formal risk registers, evidence tracking, audit workflows, consultation records, and governance dashboards, all versioned and auditable.

Rather than positioning psychological health as an HR initiative, ReFresh treats psychosocial risk as part of core workplace safety infrastructure.

Early traction and market validation

Within its first five months, ReFresh secured partnerships with global HR and payroll platform Deel and employee assistance provider Sonder, and is already in use by organisations including Safewill, Amped HQ, and Nakatomi.

The company operates with a lean five-person team supported by 14 AI agents, having deployed more than 1,800 code commits and achieved SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA compliance within seven months, a signal of enterprise-grade ambition in a highly regulated category.

The funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand enterprise adoption, and support organisations adapting to the new regulatory environment.

A permanent shift in employer accountability

The introduction of psychosocial safety regulation represents a structural change in how workplace risk is defined. Boards and executives are now expected to treat psychological health with the same seriousness as physical safety, supported by systems that provide continuous oversight rather than periodic reassurance.

This has created demand for psychosocial risk management software that enables organisations to demonstrate not just care, but control.

As similar regulatory expectations emerge in markets such as the UK and Canada, platforms like ReFresh point to a broader global shift, one where psychosocial safety becomes a permanent fixture of workplace governance, not a temporary compliance exercise.