Programme studied and graduation year: BSc Management, 2017
Entrepreneurship, social impact and a commitment to improving mental health outcomes have defined Jaron Soh's career since graduating from LSE. From launching multiple ventures and building successful technology startups to co-founding Voda, the UK's largest LGBTQIA+ mental health app, he has combined business innovation with a passion for creating meaningful change. In this Alumni of the Month interview, Jaron reflects on his entrepreneurial journey, the lessons he has learned from building purpose-driven businesses, and his advice for aspiring founders looking to turn their ideas into reality.
What are your current areas of focus, professionally or otherwise?
I'm Co-founder & CEO of Voda, the UK's largest LGBTQIA+ mental health app. We deliver evidence-based support through an identity-affirming lens, supporting over 50,000 LGBTQIA+ people across 140+ countries.
We've raised close to £900k from impact investors. Voda has been featured in Forbes, Metro, Daily Mirror, and was Apple's App of the Day and their Pride campaign. Alongside that, I angel invest in early-stage founders, mentor through LSE Generate's network, and write op-eds on queer mental health and the systems that shape it.
Tell us about your career journey since graduating from LSE?
I've been an entrepreneur since my time at LSE, where LSE Generate gave me the support and a small grant to start my first company - Artisan & Fox - an e-commerce marketplace specialising in artisan goods across the Majority World.
Thereafter, I co-founded Traktion, a venture-backed hiring platform pairing startups with vetted freelance marketers. The startup was backed by Antler, used by clients including Monzo, ASDA, and Universal Music, and acquired by Investis Digital in 2024.
Voda, the company I currently lead, came out of personal experience: queer people face disproportionately high rates of anxiety and depression because of minority stress and the systems we navigate. Most mental health products weren't designed with that in mind, so I wanted to build one that was.
What skills have you learnt along the way?
- Product Development & Innovation: Building products from the ground up, identifying market needs and transforming ideas into scalable solutions that create meaningful impact.
- Fundraising & Investor Engagement: Securing investment in challenging sectors, developing compelling business cases and building relationships with investors to support growth.
- Leadership & Team Management: Leading distributed teams across time zones, fostering collaboration, alignment and high performance within diverse and remote working environments.
- Resilience & Growth Mindset: Navigating setbacks and rejection with self-awareness and determination, using challenges as opportunities for reflection, learning and continuous improvement.
What inspired you to set up your own business?
The inspiration to start Voda came directly from my own life. I grew up in Singapore, where sex between men was criminalised under a British colonial-era law that wasn't repealed until 2022. Growing up under a law like that does something to a gay kid long before they can put words to it.
What helped me process my emotional history in my adult years was therapy. That’s what led me to start a mental health app for the LGBTQIA+ community, because I could see many of my peers struggling with similar issues of coming out, shame and hypervigilance.
Has your career worked out the way you envisioned?
Not really. I knew I wanted to work in and build startups, but I wasn't out to my family, and so being the public-facing CEO of an LGBTQIA+ focused tech company would have been unthinkable. But I’m grateful that what I'm doing now is something my younger self couldn't have imagined for himself, but would likely be really proud of.
What were the most valuable lessons you took away from studying at LSE?
The most valuable lesson came from watching what self-belief does. I spent my time at LSE surrounded by high-agency peers who often acted on the assumption that what they wanted to build was possible.
Many of them are now doing exactly that. LSE gave me a sense of realistic, grounded optimism: what I want to build is possible, as long as I figure out what the problem is, what I need to do and who I need to bring along with me.
What’s the greatest challenge you’ve had to overcome?
Most founders would agree fundraising is the least fun part of the entrepreneurial journey. Navigating investor outreach, rejections, and negotiations are challenging. But the toughest challenge for me wasn’t professional but a personal one.
I had to come out to my family before I could start Voda, and overcoming the mental barriers and fear of rejection from my loved ones made everything else feel easy in comparison.
If you had one piece of advice you could give your younger self, what would it be?
Start a business in a field that you're genuinely curious about and that work will give you energy. This is what gives you conviction to push through the boring bits, the hard bits, and is also what will attract the right people to build with you.
I love my job. That's not always a given in this work, but it's worth starting at that point.
Share with us your fondest memory of the Department of Management.
Organising Social Innovation Week as an undergrad. I ran a week of workshops with social impact founders, and being in LSE and Houghton Street made it easy to get the founders I most admired to drop by as panelists. But honestly, my deeper fondness is for the day-to-day: being on campus, sitting in lectures next to people from every corner of the world, and learning how much I didn't know.
If you would like to be our Alum of the Month or if you would like to nominate a Department of Management alumni, please email dom.alumni@lse.ac.uk.