Cara Hernon
Co-founder & CEO of Uppp
About Cara
After losing a family member to suicide, Cara made it her mission to reduce friction in accessing mental health support, especially for those who feel alienated by current solutions.
Cara has spent the last 10 years as an activist, advocate and advisor for improving mental health access, policy and campaigns.
In 2020, Cara joined Kooth PLC, to lead growth and user acquisition, since then Cara has worked on public health campaigns across regulated health, pharma and wellbeing spaces.
A letter from our Founder
We all go through patches where we feel stuck, lost, or simply off track.
And in a time where our schedules are overloaded, getting real ROI from personal growth has never mattered more.
Change is hard and staying stuck is hard, but the truth of the matter is, finding a tool that actually speak your language is shouldn’t be.
I wanted to build something that takes the mental load off — a tool that cuts through the fluff and delivers real progress, where every session moves you forward.
Because I don’t want to live in a world where people don’t get the support they need simply because the tools don’t feel like they weren’t built for them.
That’s why we’re developing tools designed to truly understand you in real time — and adapt to create a hyper-personalised path toward progress that feels natural to you.
Change is about momentum.
So let’s get you moving in the right direction.
Cara
Co-founder & CEO
Cara’s ethos
Core Belief
Energy is a currency, build momentum in the right direction. Don’t burn the house down while you do it.
Mission
Reduce the cost of entry to better mental wellbeing.
Approach
Lead with calm, take things in your stride, make decisions efficiently, and keep progress moving forward. Don’t wait to be ready — experiment, learn, grow.
Take
Stop shuffling chairs on the titanic, go make a difference.
Time
Progress is a privilege, your time is expensive, invest it wisely.
Limits
It’s not a race to the bottom, raise the bar.
Culture
t’s the environment we create together that shapes what’s possible.
The strongest cultures are those where progress is shared.
When we learn from each other, celebrate wins together, and navigate challenges as a team, momentum compounds.
Cara’s path
Curiousity
Has been known to read encyclopedias cover to cover, and methodically pull apart, disassemble social norms and behaviours in excel spreadsheets to try understand how they worked. Obsessed with human and behavioural psychology, I want to understand why and how we tick.
Perspective
Everything is figure-out-able.
I’ve lived with responsibility from a young age — both caring for others and navigating different living situations.
It taught me two things: that no one succeeds alone, and that perspective matters more than circumstances. I carry that into my leadership: calm in the chaos, decisive when it counts, with enough distance to see the bigger picture.
Cara’s questions
The cockroach
Let’s not get into it, but you can rely on Cara to get back on her feet.
Being a young carer and loss gave her perspective most people don’t get early on. Failure as a first time founder, more loss and extreme lows force you to adapt. Call it resilience, stubbornness, or refusal to stay down — but don’t count Cara out. She’ll find a way, learn, adapt, and come back stronger.
Atypical
Quit my dream job to figure out what’s next and go travelling, because they weren’t rowing in the right direction, and became to big to turn around.
Goal keeper and rugby player, way before it was cool.
Was known for selling her services as a poet and a officiant in primary school.
Systems and frameworks
See patterns, build systems, I can’t help it. Organise complexity until it becomes usable, repeatable, and valuable.
It may have started with me hand writing course criteria, corresponding previous exam questions and answers, point by point, then photocopying them and selling them in school.
Non-conformist
Tried to conform but just can’t do it. Needed to row in the direction of her vision.
Often a be the difference you want to see in the world type of person, regardless of what others think.
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If we’re asking what made me grow the most, I think perhaps having to wind-down my first company.
The closest thing I can compare it to is ego death, a massive sense of failure, of letting people down.
It makes you really re-assess who you are what you want to stand for
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I think for me it’s really about understanding what I’m doing to put the coin in the machine to keep me stuck.
Perhaps it’s a ruminating thought, a pattern of behaviour or just feeling helpless.
I realised a few years ago, while not everything (most things aren’t) is in your control. Everything is figure-out-able.
And for me, it always comes down to disrupting the pattern.
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Getting the hell out of your own way.
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Work to your natural rhythms.