Most people can name the last time they avoided a difficult conversation. The text they didn’t send. The family dinner where something important went unsaid because the risk felt too high. But avoidance is only half the story. Just as many people can recall the moment a conversation went sideways — a triggered reaction, an escalation that turned a small disagreement into a rupture, words spoken in emotional heat that couldn’t be taken back.
For Maria Barbirotto and Shawna Chiuppi, co-founders of Roonify Inc., that silence isn’t a personal failing — it’s a systemic crisis sitting at the root of broken relationships, generational trauma, and a significant share of the mental health burden worldwide.
“We measure our steps, we track our sleep,” says Maria Barbirotto, Roonify’s Founder and CEO. “But the way we communicate with the people who matter most? That’s still treated as something you either figure out or you don’t. We believe communication is a health behavior — and like any health behavior, it can be practiced and improved.”
Roonify is a relational health platform. Where therapy apps connect patients to clinicians and wellness tools offer meditation, Roonify focuses on the relationship itself. The company’s research — drawn from over 165 survey respondents — found that more than 90% said communication problems have led to unresolved conflicts, over 70% avoid difficult conversations out of fear, and 72% believe past trauma shapes how they communicate today. Yet in a digital mental health market projected to exceed $43 billion by 2028, no dominant platform addresses structured communication repair between people.
How It Works
At the center of Roonify is the Healing Circle — a private, structured digital space where people can process and navigate difficult conversations at their own pace. Circles support both individual reflection and guided exchanges between people, and are designed to create the emotional safety that most digital communication lacks.
The platform includes a proprietary AI layer that acts as a communication coach — not a chatbot. Rather than generating conversation, it helps users become more aware of how their words may land, offering guidance without overriding personal choice. The company has filed a patent on the underlying system.
“We’re building a mirror, not a gatekeeper,” says Shawna Chiuppi, Co-Founder and head of product vision. “Our model shows you what your words might feel like on the other side. Whether you change them is always your choice. That’s how you train healthier habits — by seeing clearly and choosing differently.”
Privacy as Product
In a landscape scarred by trust failures — most notably BetterHelp’s $7.8 million FTC fine in 2023 for sharing client data with advertisers — Roonify has made privacy architecture a core differentiator. The platform uses encrypted sessions, invitation-only access, pseudonymous identities, consent-based data sharing, and a “Right to Vanish” feature. All data is relationship-scoped, never globally accessible, and even in acquisition scenarios, user data cannot be transferred without fresh consent.
Looking further ahead, the company is developing a longitudinal relational health intelligence layer — a system designed to capture how communication patterns form, repeat, and change over time across relationships, families, and life stages. Where genomics companies like 23andMe map genetic predispositions, Roonify aims to map the behavioral and emotional patterns that determine how certain predispositions and emotional experiences actually manifest in our relationships. The data is entirely consent-based, anonymized, and designed to be research-grade — positioning the company not just as a consumer platform but as a new kind of behavioral science infrastructure.
The Team and What’s Ahead
Maria Barbirotto brings a background in communication, clinical psychology, and Web3 strategy. Shawna Chiuppi is a relational growth advocate focused on trauma-informed design. Founding Engineer Taylor Bryant leads the technical architecture. The company is also building a social-impact layer into its growth model, ensuring that access to relational health tools extends beyond those who can pay for them.
Roonify is currently in MVP development, targeting an internal alpha in spring 2026 and a closed beta that summer. The company has opened an invite-only waitlist and launched a Founding Providers Program to onboard trauma-informed therapists as early partners. Public launch is planned for late 2026, seeded through therapist and NGO referral networks.
“We built Roonify because we needed it,” Shawna Chiuppi says. “Not as a product — as a practice. Everything in this platform came from a real moment where someone couldn’t say what they needed to say, and the silence did more damage than any hard conversation ever could have.”
“Shawna is right — this started as something personal,” Maria Barbirotto adds. “But what we’ve built goes far beyond our own experience. This is a universal problem — every person, in every culture, in every language, struggles with the same thing: how to say what matters without causing harm. We’re creating a new category of digital infrastructure. The world has tools for physical health, tools for productivity, tools for entertainment. What it doesn’t have is a safe, intelligent system for the thing that holds all of our relationships together: communication. That’s what Roonify is.”
In a world with wearable technology for every physiological metric and virtually nothing for the health of our relationships, Roonify’s central argument is hard to dismiss: how we communicate shapes everything, and it’s time we treated it that way.
