When GrepBeat originally wrote about SenterME in the summer of 2024, it was described as “an emotional wellness resource dedicated to women professionals.” In the time since, the Triangle startup has gone through what Founder and CEO Charlotte Louis calls “a very honest pivot”—or two of them, to be exact.
“In 2024, SenterME was focused on emotional wellness and stress management for women professionals,” she said. “That was real…. But as we tested, listened, and iterated, we had to confront a hard truth: We were supporting people who were already carrying stress, but we were not actually preventing the conditions that made burnout inevitable in the first place.”
Louis said this realization pushed her upstream, ultimately leading SenterME to transform from a consumer wellness product into a B2B model aimed at addressing burnout, specifically in the healthcare industry.
The new SenterME
Some two years down the road from that original profile, SenterME is still rooted in human wellbeing but has evolved, as Louis put it, into a Structural Health Intelligence™company.
“Our work is no longer just about helping one person regulate stress in the moment,” she said. “It is about helping healthcare leaders see patterns of strain early enough to support their teams before burnout, turnover, or care disruption become hardened outcomes.”
Beyond the broad concept of burnout, the pain point SenterME aims to address is that healthcare leaders are being asked to maintain a real-time pulse on their respective workforces using tools that rely on manual input, and which are fragmented and slow.
As an example, Louis explained, “A system chief nursing officer may be responsible for understanding what is happening across many units, teams, leaders, and facilities. But the signals they rely on are often scattered across rounding conversations, staffing reports, turnover data, patient experience trends, quality reports, manager feedback, and intuition.
“By the time all of those pieces come together,” she added, “the pattern is often already visible because something has already happened: A nurse manager resigns, a unit goes quiet, turnover rises, patient experience dips, staffing instability increases, a team starts operating in survival mode.”
Narrowing that gap—between when signals of strain arise and when they’re recognized in an actionable manner—is what SenterME is now being built to address.
The pivot process
Louis said SenterME came to the particular pain point it’s addressing because she was stubborn about solving the “real problem” beneath the need for emotional wellness support.
“In 2024, we were building in the emotional wellness space, and I began to realize that while support tools were valuable, they were not enough,” she said. “If people are burning out because of the conditions around them, then only giving them self-regulation tools can unintentionally put the responsibility back on the individual.
“I did not want SenterME to become another product that helps people survive environments that are still quietly breaking them.”
From this fresh perspective, Louis started talking about burnout conditions with people leaders, HR leaders, frontline workers, and executives across industries. These conversations revealed a common pattern of the middle layer of organizations being “influential but often invisible.” Middle managers and frontline supervisors, as Louis put it, carry pressure from above and below. But systems are not equipped to recognize how strain moves through them.
While this pattern became apparent across industries, Louis noted that she kept getting pulled toward healthcare.
“Burnout is painful in every industry,” she said, “but in healthcare, the downstream impact is much more serious.”
Concentrating on this particular space, Louis found that healthcare workforce strain was a “financial, operational, and patient-safety issue.” She observed that hospitals were under margin pressure; labor costs were rising; staffing instability was affecting care; and leaders were being pressured to defend workforce investments.
This extent of instability (and burnout potential) in a high-stakes environment helped solidify the realization that traditional wellness programs are inadequate.
“Many leaders told us some version of, ‘We care about wellbeing, but we cannot keep defending wellness investments if we cannot connect them to operational outcomes,’” she said. “That was a turning point for us. We realized SenterME needed to preserve the human support layer, but also built the intelligence layer that leaders could actually use.”
How SenterME works today
SenterME’s process for users begins with Signal Capture—a “lightweight, privacy-safe” tool through which a charge nurse or other participant can efficiently share signals relating to stress level, emotional state, and pressure. This can be as simple and intuitive as indicating a higher stress level and a current emotional state of “pissed off.”
Following input, the participant will receive recommended self-regulation tools to support them. While this assistance for individuals is in place, however, Louis stressed that the data conveyed through Signal Capture is not received or stored as a personal complaint; participants are not exposed in any way through personal “scores” or emotional profiles.
Rather, data is aggregated within a broader picture of the strain felt by an entire unit.
“A single check-in is not the story; the pattern is,” she said. “When enough signals begin to show that a unit is moving from stable to strained, or that middle-layer leaders are carrying more coordinated pressure than usual, SenterME can help leadership see that earlier.”
Through aggregated Signal Capture data, “Santi”—SenterME’s Structural Health Intelligence™ engine—detects strain patterns, monitors changes, and classifies the structural health of individual units as “Stable,” “Watch,” “Strained,” or “Critical.” Per Louis, it then “connects those states to possible actions” for course correction.
“For example,” she offered, “one pattern may suggest that the most practical move is not a broad wellness campaign, but targeted manager support, workflow adjustment, escalation of staffing review, schedule stabilization, or focused intervention in a unit where strain is beginning to concentrate.”
These interventions are, as Louis put it, “leader-led and human-in-the-loop.” Santi makes informed recommendations, and leaders (CNOs, nursing operations leaders, etc.) make decisions.
SenterME since the pivot
Louis said she saw validation for this new approach from a 90-day MVP, which included 86 active users and more than 200 behavioral signals—and which ultimately backed up the notion that people would voluntarily share signals “when the value exchange and trust model were clear.”
The new version of SenterME became public-facing in late 2025, with Santi shipping in the spring. Santi is now being demoed in three health systems (two in North Carolina).
Louis also noted that communicating the new version of the company has yielded positive engagement with assorted ecosystem programs and opportunities. SenterME has been selected for the Conscious Venture Lab and the 2026 cohort of Blueprint Tulsa; as of this writing, it is also a semifinalist for the Massachusetts eHealth Primary Care Challenge and The Workers Lab, and a finalist for 757 Accelerate.
“We are still early, but we are no longer in the ‘interesting idea’ stage,” Louis said. “We have a sharper market, a clearer buyer, a validated problem, an entry product, health systems in the pipeline, and a technical path that is becoming more defined.”
Moving forward, Louis is focused on building her founding team. She recently brought on a Founding Technical Lead and is actively seeking to fill other positions (visible on SenterME’s career page).
She is also seeking a first cohort of health systems to go through SenterME’s 90-day diagnostic program, which is designed to “help leaders quantify workforce exposure, establish a structural baseline, and determine whether earlier, actionable visibility is valuable to their system in one quarter.”
Further yet into the future, the plan is for SenterME’s Structural Health Intelligence™ platform to be applied similarly across multiple industries. But Louis said the early focus will remain on healthcare.
“Healthcare is the right place to prove the model.”
