Bloom

Inspiration

Social anxiety affects 1 in 3 people. Exposure therapy is the gold standard treatment, but it costs $150 a session, has a 3-6 month waitlist, and requires 12-20 sessions to complete. We've spent months working with thousands of youth, listening to them describe the same barrier over and over: stigma, cost, and time block access to care.

What it does

Bloom is an AI-guided exposure therapy app for social anxiety, structured as a 4-phase journey. Users move through Plant (psychoeducation), Water (fear hierarchy, cognitive reframing, behavioural experiment, and box breathing), and Grow (AI roleplay), and Nourish (personal practice plan). Each phase is structured based on what the creators use in clinical practice: cognitive behavioural therapy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The hardest problem was scope. Exposure therapy is a 12-20 session protocol — compressing it into one meaningful, safe, and accurate session required real clinical judgment about what to include and what to defer. We also had to design careful safety gates: Bloom is built for mild-to-moderate social anxiety, and we needed clear off-ramps for users who present with more acute symptoms.

What we learned

People don't lack the desire to get better. They lack access to tools that actually work. And when you give them a structured, warm, guided experience — not a chatbot, not a worksheet — they engage. The session format matters as much as the clinical content.

What's next for Bloom

Bloom is a focused proof-of-concept within a larger vision to empower young people to live with a healthier, happier mind. Next steps include clinical validation with a test cohort before integrating it with our existing community of 18,000+ users for peer support handoff after the AI session ends.

Built With

• dart
• flutter