Alex and Chris Naoumidis: The Brothers Who Put Gut Hypnotherapy in Your Pocket

Most IBS treatments are something you eat, avoid or swallow. The one Alex and Chris Naoumidis built is something you listen to. Nerva, the app the Melbourne brothers launched in 2019, delivers gut-directed hypnotherapy, a talking therapy developed in hospital clinics, as six weeks of short daily audio sessions on a phone. It is one of the few consumer gut-health products with a randomized controlled trial behind it, and this summer it became something almost no wellness app can claim: available to eligible people on Original Medicare at no out-of-pocket cost. The brothers’ own summary of the idea is disarmingly simple. “Could we do for hypnotherapy what meditation apps did for mindfulness,” Alex recalls asking, “and bring a ‘woo woo’ approach to the mainstream?”

The brothersMind over matter, at the dinner table

The idea arrived early, from their father. “Growing up a big philosophy of our Dad’s was mind over matter,” Alex, the elder of the two, told Alberts, an early investor, in 2023, “that your mind and therefore your brain regulates everything from pain perception to habits to addiction.” Their father was a technology founder and a regular user of hypnotherapy himself. “That idea of pure self-belief,” Chris added, “that you can create a mindset that positively impacts your life was a big part of our upbringing and we wondered if we could bring that to more people.”

Neither brother is a clinician. Alex worked as an accountant and Chris studied commerce at Monash University; they taught themselves to code, and their first startup, a peer-to-peer dress rental app called Covet, did not take off. The gut connection is personal, though not in the way you might assume. Alex has celiac disease, and before that diagnosis he went through a stretch of believing he had IBS, an experience he has described in a company talk as part of the story behind Nerva. Alberts described him as someone with “an intimate understanding of what it’s like to live with a chronic condition.” He is careful to say he does not have IBS; what he knows is the restrictive diet, and the search for an answer.

The pivotThe IBS pack that outperformed everything

The company they founded in 2018, Mindset Health, started as a general hypnosis app. The brothers had come across the clinical evidence for hypnotherapy and noticed that it was strongest in one place. “It was backed by research, especially when it came to IBS,” Alex told LaunchVic, “but not many people knew about hypnotherapy or considered it serious.” So Alex emailed Dr. Simone Peters, a Monash-trained psychophysiologist and gut-directed hypnotherapist who had founded the gut-directed hypnotherapy program at Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital, and together they added an IBS program to the app. It did better than anything else they offered. During Y Combinator’s summer 2019 batch, they narrowed their focus. “It was during the three-month program that we decided to focus on digital therapeutics,” Alex said, “and when we launched Nerva for IBS.”

The research foundation they built on is Peters’s own. In a 2016 randomized trial of 74 people with IBS at Monash, in-person gut-directed hypnotherapy improved symptoms about as much as the low-FODMAP diet, and did better on measures of anxiety and depression. For people who struggle with a restrictive diet, or have already tried one, that was a striking result. The obvious problem was access: trained gut-directed hypnotherapists are rare, and sessions are costly. “Patients experience the best outcomes when medical, dietary, and psychological care are integrated,” Alex wrote in 2025, “but GI psychologists are in short supply, and waitlists are long.” Nerva is their answer to the waitlist.

The evidenceA real trial, read at its real size

Here is where Nerva stands apart from most of what is sold for gut health. In February 2025 the American Journal of Gastroenterology published a randomized controlled trial run by researchers at Monash University, including Peters and Peter Gibson, one of the developers of the low-FODMAP diet. It enrolled 244 adults with IBS and compared the full Nerva program with a carefully matched control: the same six-week app, with the same daily education sessions, minus the hypnotherapy. At the end of the program, 81 percent of the hypnotherapy group had a clinically meaningful drop in symptom severity, against 63 percent of the control group, and 71 percent had at least a 30 percent reduction in pain, against 35 percent. Using an active control rather than a waiting list is the demanding way to run a trial like this, and the app cleared it.

It is worth being as precise about the limits. The trial was funded by Mindset Health, and the researchers who ran it include the author of the app’s protocol and two members of the company’s advisory board. Nine in ten participants were women, and nobody older than 65 took part. Anxiety and mood improved about equally in both groups, so the psychological benefit was not specific to hypnotherapy. And an earlier look at real-world users from 2019 and 2020 found that only 9 percent completed all 42 sessions, a problem the company says it has since worked on. None of this undercuts the central finding. It tells you what the next trials should look like: independent, older, more men, and head to head with in-person therapy. Nerva is not evaluated by the FDA, and the company says so on its own site.

The momentMedicare, and what it means

On July 5, Mindset Health began taking part in the ACCESS Model, a new ten-year Medicare program from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services that pays for technology-enabled care for chronic conditions. CMS’s list of participants shows the company in two tracks, behavioral health and musculoskeletal pain, so eligibility runs through a qualifying condition in those tracks rather than through IBS itself, as the company’s announcement is careful to note. For eligible people on Original Medicare, the program costs nothing out of pocket. “There are millions of people on Medicare living with gut-brain disorders who have never been offered a program that addresses the gut-brain connection directly,” Alex said. “With ACCESS, those people now have access to care that was out of reach — not because the evidence was missing, but because the payment model had not caught up.” For everyone else, Nerva lists at $199 a year after a seven-day free trial.

The company has also grown sideways. It raised a $12 million Series A in 2023 led by King River Capital, made Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Asia list for healthcare and science in 2022, built hypnotherapy programs for menopause hot flashes, pain and anxiety, and in May 2025 bought the key assets of Mahana Therapeutics, another digital gut-brain company. And one of its programs had two very early users. On their smoking cessation app, Alex told Alberts: “Chris and I used it to quit vaping.”

The disclosure mapWhere their interests sit

Alex and Chris Naoumidis co-founded Mindset Health and hold the financial stake that implies. The company paid for the trial described above; Simone Peters, whose protocol Nerva uses, is one of its authors and is described by the company as Nerva’s content founder, and two other authors sit on its advisory board. User numbers the company publishes, including its figure of more than 300,000 people helped, are its own. Medicare participation runs through the ACCESS Model’s behavioral health and musculoskeletal tracks and is not a Medicare endorsement of the app. Neither brother is a clinician, and nothing here is advice; gut symptoms can have many causes, including celiac disease, so anyone with ongoing symptoms should start with their own doctor. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with Mindset Health. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from the company.