“We found Cozecare to address the ‘silence between appointments’ – the void that patients feel in the days between sessions, when they need support the most and have the least,” explains Francisco Martins, a co-founder of Cozecare and a student in the Undergraduate Programme in Computer Science and Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa. Cozecare connects patients with verified psychologists and offers continuous support between sessions through daily check-ins, personalised exercises, and automatic speech transcriptions, among other features.
Francisco Martins co-created the app with a colleague from the University of Minho. Their experience working with various psychologists led them to recognise, together, the risks of deteriorating mental health and a lack of ongoing support between sessions. Cozecare aims to minimise the ‘gaps’ between scheduled appointments, which can be periods of heightened vulnerability for some patients.
“The technical knowledge I acquired while studying Computer Science and Engineering at Técnico was directly applied to the development of the platform, enabling us to build it as robustly as possible from both an engineering and a product perspective”, the student explains.
Cozecare has results to prove this robustness – at the end of April, it was recognised by The Ventures Portugal 2026 in the Best Traction category, among more than 600 participating projects. It was also a finalist in the MIT 100k Portugal and Startup World Cup Portugal 2026 entrepreneurship programmes, and received an honourable mention in the 2026 National Innovation Award.
“In around nine months, we have built and tested the platform with dozens of psychologists, and we have recently seen an average of about four new psychologists joining the platform every day. If this pace continues, we expect to exceed 100 active psychologists by September,” he stated before the summer holidays. In fact, by September, Cozecare already had 300 professionals on board. “We are also partnering with many Portuguese universities on initiatives related to mental health”, adds the student, who is now pursuing a Master’s Programme in Computer Science and Engineering. He also highlighted the platform’s participation in the Bioengineering and Biomedical Week (also known as JOB2BE).
