Episode 5: Repowering Balance: Mental Wellness as an Impact Investment
Joshua Haynes is the Founder and Managing Partner of Masawa, the world’s first mental wellness impact fund, dedicated to repowering balance — in founders, in organizations, and in the financial systems that shape our world.
With over 20 years at the intersection of technology, innovation, and social impact, Joshua brings a rare combination of lived experience and systemic expertise to everything he builds. He spent seven years as a diplomat in the Obama administration, managing a $200M portfolio of impact funding and designing civil society innovation ecosystems across 35+ countries. He has also been a social entrepreneur, a software developer, and a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco.
It was his own mental health breakdown — and the clarity that followed — that led Joshua to found Masawa alongside co-founder Sabine Flesher. Together, they created something the impact investment world had never seen: a fund that invests not only in mental wellness companies, but in the mental health and resilience of the founders behind them.
At the heart of Masawa is the Nurture Capital approach — a framework that supports founders psychologically throughout the investment journey, from deep-dive due diligence to co-founder coaching, leadership development, and soft-landing planning. Structurally, Masawa shares 10% of its carried interest back with its portfolio founders and caps its own profits, redirecting surplus into a communally governed foundation.
Joshua believes that healing the world starts with healing the humans leading the change. His work is a blueprint for what finance looks like when it takes people seriously.
What if the root of every global crisis — climate, conflict, inequality — is actually a mental health crisis in disguise?
In this episode of the Explorers Podcast, Lila Behr speaks with Joshua Haynes, Founder of Masawa, the world’s first mental wellness impact fund, about what it truly means to invest in human flourishing.
From his own personal breakdown to building a fund that puts founder wellbeing at the center of its financial architecture, Joshua shares a vision of capital that nurtures rather than extracts — and why mental health is not a charity cause, but an economic imperative.
Topics include:
• Nurture Capital & the future of founder support
• Mental wellness as an investible market — the $3 trillion opportunity
• From dementia prevention to eating disorder recovery: inside Masawa’s portfolio
• The gut-brain axis, psychedelics & emerging frontiers of mental wellness
• What it means to know your “enough number” — and why it changes everything
A conversation for anyone ready to rethink what impact investing can look like when it starts from the inside out.
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