Because Univa exists, families recover together.
That one sentence is why we come to work. Here's where it came from.
Proud partners of the 
The problem we couldn't unsee
Every eating disorder story we heard had the same shape. A family notices something. They ask for help. And then — they wait. Weeks for an appointment, months for treatment, and in between: silence, guesswork, and mealtimes that get harder while nobody's watching.
None of this is the fault of the people giving the care. The clinicians we met were some of the most dedicated we've known — skilled teams doing their utmost in services that are underfunded and overstretched, with referrals rising faster than anyone can answer them. Burnout in these teams isn't a weakness; it's arithmetic.
So we kept meeting the same three people: brilliant, exhausted parents desperate for care of their loved one; young people doing their bravest work with limited support; and great clinicians who could see exactly what families needed, without the hours to give it.
Between us, we'd spent twenty years building digital healthcare — Rich founding Healios, the UK's largest digital mental health clinic for children and young people, and Jose building health technology after serious illness arrived in his own family.
At Healios, the referrals kept telling the same story: more and more young people with eating difficulties and families struggling to access specialist eating disorder services. We'd both seen eating disorders up close, in families and friends we love. So we built the thing we couldn't find.
The family is the unit of recovery
Recovery from an eating disorder is not a solo act. The whole household is wounded, and the whole household heals. So we built the first platform that supports two people at once: the person with the eating disorder, and the carer beside them — each with their own journey, moving toward the same recovery.
And when we say family, we mean the people who matter most to the person recovering — a parent, a partner, a grandparent, the closest of friends. No one should recover alone. Whoever stands beside them, we built Univa for them too.
Care that starts the night the fear starts
Because waiting deepens the illness.
Skills for carers in their own right
Because you can't pour from an empty cup.
Hope that points at evidence
Because families have been promised too much by too many.
Co-created, evidence-based, honestly told
Univa is built on the approaches with the strongest evidence — then shaped, line by line, with the people who live it.
Family therapy for anorexia — the family therapy NICE recommends first for young people with anorexia.
Cognitive behavioural therapy for eating disorders.
The carer approach developed at King's College London and the Maudsley Hospital.
Hundreds of hours of patient and carer experience are woven into our programmes — their videos, their words, their hard-won practical wisdom. Our carer skills content is created with Jenny Langley, co-author of the New Maudsley skills-based training manual. Our clinical content is developed and reviewed by eating disorder specialists, and Univa is available in a growing number of NHS eating disorder services.
Guided by people who know this from every side
Clinicians, researchers and voices of lived experience — alongside advisors who know the NHS from the inside. Together they challenge our thinking and hold every programme to one standard: would we offer this to a family we love?
Two routes, one standard
Both routes lead to the same programmes, the same standards and the same belief.
Families come to us directly — often at midnight, often before any diagnosis.
Services commission us to extend their care between sessions, and to provide ARFID programmes their pathways were never built for.
We measure ourselves the way families do: calmer tables, small steps forward, health returning — and a whole family getting its life back.
A world where no family waits alone
Where no parent searches alone at midnight, and no young person waits months for their first real help. Where care fits the person in front of it — their diagnosis, how their mind works, their pace. And where no family is told the service can't support their diagnosis.
We're not there yet. We're taking it the way recovery goes: day by day, family by family —
small steps at full volume.
Wherever you're starting from, start with us
One place, whatever brought you here.
