About Halora
Our story
Halora started with Manny’s frustration. She’s a mental health counselor in Bellevue, and for years she gave and looked for referrals the way most providers around here do: Facebook groups, listservs, long email threads. It worked, mostly. But posts got buried, replies didn’t tell you much, and matching a client with the right colleague took more scrolling and following up than it should. She kept thinking: someone should organize this.
She brought it to Rohith (her husband, an engineer). They talked through how it might work, and then he built a first version and surprised her with it. She showed it to her colleagues. They asked to use it.
To make sure it wasn’t just their circle, they emailed a local listserv of about 250 providers. Around 40 wrote back interested. That was the signal that made us take it seriously.
We’ve been building Halora since, with the Washington providers who joined early. It’s free to use. When something’s broken or missing, members tell us and we fix it. That’s the operating model right now.
Who we are
Manny is a licensed mental health counselor in Bellevue, Washington, with a master’s in counseling from City University of Seattle. She runs her own practice, working with clients on life transitions, trauma, and racial identity, in English and Punjabi. Much of her work is with people from collectivist cultures: communities where wellbeing is shared, not individual. That idea is all over Halora too.
Her practice →
Rohith is a machine-learning engineer. He’s spent years building systems and teaching machines to do things, at Microsoft Research, and later on self-driving cars. He builds most of what you see here.
LinkedIn →Why it’s free
Halora is a passion project. We want to help streamline the processes mental health professionals deal with every day, and we’re starting with referrals. The longer-term goal: one platform where providers across the United States can find each other, refer to each other, and build a professional community.
The costs are currently on us, the founders. We haven’t figured out how Halora will sustain itself long-term and honestly, that’s on purpose. A network like this only works if counselors join and use it, so our whole priority is making the product genuinely useful and making life easier for the professionals in the field. Everything else comes after.