[Interview] "Combining 20 Years Offline and 10 Years Online Experience... Advancing Toward an Integrated Mental Healthcare Platform"

Taewook Kim, CTO of Dain:
"Combining Offline Experience and Online Technology with Trost"
Nudge Healthcare Welcomes Dain and Trost
"Aiming to Introduce a New Paradigm"

"By integrating Dain's 20 years of offline experience with Trost's 10 years of online expertise, we aim to introduce a new paradigm in the domestic mental healthcare market."

Taewook Kim, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Dain. Nudge Healthcare

Taewook Kim, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Dain, shared this goal in a recent interview with Asia Economy, stating, "With the merger of the two companies, offline experience and online technology have come together."

Nudge Healthcare is accelerating the development of an "integrated mental healthcare platform" by bringing Dain and Humart Company under its umbrella. This integration brings together Dain, which was the first in Korea to introduce an Employee Assistance Program (EAP), and Humart Company, which launched the country's first non-face-to-face psychological counseling service, Trost, in 2014. EAP is a corporate welfare program designed to help employees focus on their work. It covers not only mental health counseling but also a wide range of areas including physical correction, exercise, meditation, education, as well as legal, financial, and other life counseling services.

Kim, the CTO, highlighted the growth potential of the EAP service market. This is due to increased societal attention to mental health following the COVID-19 pandemic. He said, "As loneliness and social isolation became widely discussed during the COVID-19 blues, the number of counseling sessions has surged each year. In particular, in the first half of 2025, counseling related to burnout increased by more than 20% compared to the previous year, and the number of users undergoing depression screenings rose by about 1.5 times."

He added, "The cumulative number of participants in Dain's EAP program has surpassed 1.2 million, and overall, the number of counseling sessions is increasing by 20-30% annually. As a result, companies have started to allocate their budgets more proactively."

Nudge Healthcare is targeting both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) markets through Dain's NudgeEAP and Trost, respectively. NudgeEAP provides customized welfare programs for corporate clients, while Trost focuses on mental care services for individuals. Kim explained the distinction, saying, "NudgeEAP offers not only mental health support but also education, counseling, diagnostics, and organizational analysis at the organizational level, whereas Trost is dedicated solely to mental care itself."

As a co-founder of Humart Company, which developed Trost, Kim is now driving synergy between the two services at Nudge Healthcare. He stated, "By combining Dain's offline operational data with Trost's online IT data, we have been able to strengthen mental and physical care content tailored for office workers. The non-face-to-face counseling technology, text-based emotion analysis, and AI-powered psychological counseling technology developed by Trost are also contributing to the advancement of NudgeEAP."

However, the integration process was not without challenges. He explained, "We were concerned about how to effectively apply programs that had been conducted offline to the online environment. But by comparing each other's strengths and weaknesses, we were able to identify areas where we could maximize our capabilities."

Through this process, synergy with Nudge Healthcare's flagship service, Cashwalk, is also expanding. Trost's services, such as psychological assessments, sound therapy, and meditation, are now integrated into Cashwalk. As a result, users can now engage with mental care more naturally in their daily lives. This is expected to create a virtuous cycle, where initial experiences with light mental care lead to actual counseling sessions.

The company's future plans are also clear. Kim said, "We plan to incorporate Trost's digital technology into the integrated mental healthcare platform being developed by Dain. Furthermore, we aim to evolve the employee well-being program into a comprehensive welfare program that covers all aspects of human resources (HR), including recruitment and job training, thereby introducing a new paradigm."

He concluded, "EAP and psychological counseling are not just simple services-they can change a person's life and sometimes become a turning point. Our goal is to make it easier for more people to access help through the integrated mental healthcare platform."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.