OVER the last couple of weeks, entrepreneur Sumit Mittal's health-tech platform, VentAllOut, has seen a barrage of reflections, confessions, and opinions. From rants about entertaining toddlers during quarantine to how countries are handling the pandemic, users have been venting about everything under the sun. "As long as the content is clean," cautions the 45-year-old. The year-old platform is seeing impressive traffic as individuals are looking to express themselves while cooped up indoors. In the last one month, the platform has seen a 66 per cent rise in users. "You can consider it your own diary, which is open to viewing but you remain anonymous." To give it structure, he has introduced categories such as politics, current affairs, confession, entertainment, daily drag, relationships and grievance. Queer issues and women's rights are in the pipeline. When we logged in, the discussions surrounded whether the lockdown extension is justified, and, hearteningly, the benefits of reading newspapers.

Launched last February, VentAllOut is an online outlet to let off steam and candidly express emotions with the intention of promoting healthy discussions. It operates as an interest-based network, where you log in and see content relevant to your interests, regardless of who has posted it. For Mittal, the inspiration came from what he calls the "fakeness" around. "Social media is full of manufactured, Pinterest-worthy pictures. We don't know the reality behind them. A fashion influencer posing with an artfully arranged latte and avocado toast might just be battling depression." For over 15 years, Mittal, a trained six sigma professional, was part of the payment industry. He was the founding member of SBI credit card in 1998. Later, he moved to MasterCard and spearheaded the business in the Middle East.