The Questions That Led to Tatwa

Before founding Tatwa, Laurent Gheller worked as a systems engineer and project manager. He spent his days analyzing complex problems, creating structure, and figuring out what needed to change. Then he faced burnout.

For someone trained to understand systems, it forced a very different kind of question. Laurent knew how to look at something complicated from the outside, break it down, identify what was not working, and search for a solution. What he understood far less was what was happening within himself. That process of looking inward changed the direction of his life.

He began turning the same curiosity he had once applied to technical systems toward the mind, the body, and human experience. He trained as a therapist, eventually moved to Colombia, and founded Tatwa. But he did not leave his engineering background behind. If anything, it became one of the things that shaped Tatwa most.

Engineering had taught Laurent to value rigor, question assumptions, and look for evidence rather than accept an explanation simply because it sounded convincing. His years spent with Indigenous peoples introduced him to different ways knowledge can be passed on, through lived experience, observation, tradition, and what one generation shares with the next.

He became interested in what happens when those worlds meet. Not by treating them as interchangeable, and not by forcing one to validate the other, but by staying open enough to learn while remaining clear about the difference between lived experience, personal belief, traditional knowledge, and what science can actually demonstrate.

That thinking became central to Tatwa and sits behind its signature: Nature / Consciousness / Science. For Laurent, curiosity does not mean accepting everything. It also means being willing to question what you think you know, including your own beliefs. As he puts it, “Staying curious enough to explore and rigorous enough to question, including my own beliefs.”

Today, Tatwa develops products around a broader understanding of well-being, one that considers emotional life, our relationship with ourselves, and the meaning we give to our experiences. From difficulty sleeping and the kind of overthinking that makes it hard to switch off to emotional upheaval, life transitions, and the search for greater clarity, these experiences shape how we live, relate to others, and make choices. Laurent began his career solving systems outside himself, while the path that led to Tatwa began with paying much closer attention to what was happening within.

The engineer never disappeared. He simply started asking different questions.

Further reading: https://tatwa.eu/

Founder Stories looks at the people, experiences, and turning points behind the companies inside The Million Token Window. Because the story of a company often starts long before anyone decides to build one.