Maria Barbirotto has been building since her early twenties. For nearly a decade, she ran her own creative agency, scaling it internationally before exiting at 31 and reaching financial independence.
But for her, early retirement wasn’t an ending, it was a shift. Less urgency. More intention. More selective challenges.
Today, she is the co-founder and CEO of Roonify, a relational health company focused on strengthening how people navigate conflict and repair.
We spoke with Maria about early success, founder evolution, and why she believes communication breakdown may be the real invisible crisis of our time.
You built and ran your own agency for nearly a decade. What did entrepreneurship teach you early on?
Entrepreneurship teaches you about people before it teaches you about business. That business is psychological before it’s financial. And for me that has always been an important driving factor. I am fascinated by human behavior and psychology.
When you run a company young, you’re constantly navigating emotion. You see how quickly tension can derail progress if it’s not handled well.
Ten years running an agency pushed me to remove the background noise in order to achieve my goals and optimize my performance and the performance of those working with me.
People think the biggest upgrade in entrepreneurship is money, but the real upgrade is autonomy, being able to choose where your energy goes with precision and focus. Entrepreneurship taught me that freedom is a personal attitude, that mindset influences your performance, and that building something you’re deeply passionate about is 50% of working smarter, not harder.
It also changed my relationship with ambition. I didn’t become less driven, but when I started my goal was to push myself to the next level, to escape my surroundings and avoid being trapped in a life that everyone was complaining about. With the years, I became more intentional with my ambition, no longer to escape something, but in order to gain something enriching. The more experiences, lessons, and uncomfortable situations I can put myself in, the more I will gain tools, skills and perspectives that refine my entrepreneurial experience.
You reached financial independence at 31. How did that change your trajectory?
It changed how I made decisions.
When you’re building from necessity, speed dominates. When you’re financially independent, alignment matters more.
For me, retirement isn’t about stepping away from work, it’s about gaining the freedom of choosing where my energy goes. I stepped into a new phase of my professional life. I embraced individual challenges and new environments deliberately because I wanted to expand my perspective and keep collecting life experiences that I can then sum up in my everyday life. I always joke that I like to collect lives like a video game.
That freedom allowed me to observe the world and its patterns more objectively and build things that really move me and focus on things that could have a great impact. I like challenge too much and I like building too much. It’s very hard to discern the two things when you have an entrepreneurial mindset.
You’ve built financial freedom, exited successfully, and intentionally designed your life around autonomy.
Now you’re building in the relational health field. That feels like a different arena entirely. What pulled you in that direction?
Roonify was born under two complementary premises. The first one is personal. Relational health has impacted me my whole life. One of the foundational relationships in my existence carries heavy dysfunction that has been passed down for generations. And even after years of self-work the communication between me and this person can still hurt.
You can evolve. You can become self-aware. You can build a completely different life. And still, in certain conversations, you feel eight years old again.
My interest in relational health came from necessity. I wanted something that could help me feel safe in triggering interactions. I wanted a buffer between reaction and response. I wanted something that could protect repair instead of escalating damage. Because despite love being there, sometimes the skillset to communicate safely isn’t.
The second driver is intellectual. I studied clinical psychology in college, and I’ve always been obsessed with human behavior. Even when I was building my agency, what fascinated me most was how people think, how they react under pressure, how misalignment creates chaos.
Over the years I kept noticing something: we have tools for almost everything, but when it comes to conflict, we rely on instinct. And instinct is usually wired by trauma, ego, or inherited patterns. That gap stayed with me.
You’ve described Roonify as building in relational health. When you think about what you’re creating, what vision comes to mind?
I see a missing layer in society.
Relational health has never had real infrastructure. We measure everything in modern life — productivity, physical health, financial performance — but we don’t have infrastructure for relational health. There’s never been a real longitudinal layer around relational patterns.
And yet it is underneath everything.
We are building comprehensive infrastructure for relational health. A place where people can process, reflect, repair, and actually grow in how they relate to each other.
The vision is to build a space where unhealthy communication patterns can finally be interrupted and reshaped.
Relational instability affects families, friends, founders, partnerships, institutions. It shapes generational outcomes. It influences how families connect, how leaders build, how children grow, how teams perform.
Relational health affects everything in our lives. If that layer is unstable, everything above it is fragile.
The goal is to make communication something people can train, strengthen, and return to.
You talk about relational health almost like infrastructure. Why do you see it as foundational rather than emotional?
Because everything else depends on it.
We like to label relational issues as emotional, as if that makes them secondary. But relationships are the operating system of our lives. They affect our entire existence — how safe we feel, how we attach, how we respond, how we raise children, how we love.
When we started researching the space, what stood out wasn’t that people struggle with communication, it’s how universal it is. Most adults report avoiding difficult conversations. Many associate conflict with anxiety, shutdown, anger, or emotional overwhelm. And yet we’ve built almost no structured, everyday tools to deal with that.
People don’t wake up wanting to fight, they wake up wanting to be understood. But when emotions spike, we default to patterns we didn’t consciously choose, like silence, escalation, defensiveness, withdrawal. And those patterns shape lives.
I’ve seen families with deep love fracture because they don’t know how to repair safely. I’ve experienced personally how generational patterns can quietly shape behavior for decades. That’s structural.
Relational health determines whether pressure creates growth or destruction, conflict becomes evolution or rupture, and whether tension leads to connection or distance.
So, we’re building a relational health infrastructure intended as a structured space people can rely on to handle conflict safely, interrupt unhealthy patterns, and strengthen how they connect over time.
What role does emotional safety play in communication — and why is it so rare?
A huge pattern in communication is that people tend to communicate poorly because they don’t feel safe. When someone feels threatened, even subtly, their nervous system shifts into defense. And once you’re in defense, you’re not listening anymore. You’re protecting, which can easily turn into attacking. A quote from psychologist Marshall Rosenberg states “If ‘violent’ means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate could indeed be called ‘violent’ communication.”
The problem is that most communication environments aren’t designed for safety. They’re reactive. They happen in the heat of the moment. There’s no pause, no structure, no container.
That’s why emotional safety feels rare and accidental. It depends on two people being regulated at the same time, which doesn’t happen often.
What we’re building is a continuous layer of support around those moments, rather than a crisis-based solution. Not just something you access when things collapse, but something that exists before, during, and after conversations. A space that helps slow down instinct, regulate reaction, and make repair possible.
What does it mean to build a continuous layer of support rather than a crisis-based solution?
Most relational support today activates after damage has already been done.
Therapy is powerful, but it’s episodic. Workshops are useful, but they’re temporary. Advice is abundant, but it’s generic.
A continuous layer of support means something you can return to consistently. Not only when a relationship is breaking, but when tension first appears. When something feels off. When you need clarity before speaking.
It means supporting the process of communication as a foundational layer of our everyday existence.
You are a digital mental health startup, tech is core to your foundation. How do you see technology helping without replacing human connection?
Technology shouldn’t replace connection. It should protect it. Right now, most technology accelerates reaction — faster messages, faster replies, faster escalation. We’ve optimized speed, not reflection.
I see technology as a way to introduce pause. To create structure. To support awareness before expression.
It can guide, suggest, slow down, highlight patterns, but the goal isn’t to remove the human element. It’s to strengthen it and build closer connections. Technology just creates a safer container for it.
Why is now the right cultural moment for something like this to exist? Because we’ve reached a level of emotional charge that we can’t hide anymore.
Society is tense. Families are divided. Political discourse is hostile. Social media amplifies outrage. People are exhausted from conflict, online and offline.
For decades, we were able to suppress or normalize relational dysfunction. Now it’s visible everywhere.
Mental health conversations opened the door. People are more aware of trauma, attachment, triggers.
We’ve reached a point where emotional volatility is affecting daily life at scale. When that happens, you either normalize chaos or you build infrastructure to support stability.
I know this is the moment to start building.
What would success look like beyond user growth or metrics?
Success would look like a universal improvement in how we interrupt unhealthy patterns.
It would look like fewer conversations ending in permanent rupture, people choosing repair instead of withdrawal, children growing up in environments where conflict doesn’t automatically mean danger.
If we start hearing people say, “I handled that differently than I would have five years ago,” that’s success. If generational cycles soften instead of harden, that’s success. User growth matters for scale, but the real success we are going after is cultural shift.
Relational health is not a new concept. Therapists, psychologists, and researchers have studied attachment, conflict, and generational patterns for decades. But outside clinical settings, most people are left to navigate emotionally charged conversations alone.
Roonify reports that the majority of adults consistently report avoiding difficult conversations, and a significant portion associate conflict with anxiety, shutdown, or escalation. At the same time, rates of reported loneliness, polarization, and relational strain continue to rise. The need is visible.
Barbirotto and her partners’ bet is that relational health is approaching an inflection point similar to where mental health stood a decade ago: widely experienced, openly discussed, but still under-supported in daily life.
With Roonify, they are attempting to build a structured layer around communication itself — one designed for continuity. If the category evolves the way they anticipate, Roonify may be one of the early companies shaping how that future takes form.
It’s a space worth watching.
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