Why a tech founder is building Edmonton’s first social sauna

Marissa McNeelands knows the customer she’s building for, because she used to be her. A decade in tech left the Edmonton entrepreneur burned out, and she found what helped in a hot sauna and a cold plunge. 

Now she’s building it into a business.

The first time she walked into Othership, a social sauna in Toronto, they turned off the lights, started hitting a gong, and the whole room began yelling into the dark.

“I was like, oh yes, this is exactly what I need in this world right now,” she told me over video. It was years ago, when she was living in Toronto and running a company in tech.

Othership gave her a way out of the tech grind, built around something called contrast therapy, which is a stretch in a hot sauna followed by a plunge into cold water, repeated a few times over a session. McNeelands had tried the destination version before, at Kananaskis Nordic Spa outside Calgary, but that’s the kind of place you visit once or twice a year. The Toronto version was different and offered a weekly ritual rather than a retreat, so she leaned on it the whole time she lived there.

It “literally helped me to survive that time of my life,” she says.

She and her husband, Kevin Prasad, have since moved back to Alberta where they are building Circa Thermal Studio. Slated to open in January, Circa will become the first social sauna in Edmonton.

Before Circa, McNeelands founded and led the women-in-tech talent and community platform Toast, where she bootstrapped the company past $1 million in revenue in under two years, then sold her stake in 2025.

What she is building now is aimed at a specific group of people.

“Circa isn’t created for the wellness people,” she says. “It’s created for the high achievers, the high performers, the perfectionists, the people that are running themselves into the ground and only have 75 minutes once a week to devote to themselves.”

McNeelands holds a Master’s in Management and Artificial Intelligence, and part of what drew her to a physical space was how hard it is to copy. The barriers to building a software company have fallen so far, she says, that the competitive moat is gone, while a sauna and a membership built on ritual can’t be copied the same way. Circa is that bet.

The permanent studio will open in the Keswick area of southwest Edmonton, with construction slated to start in August pending city approvals. It will have a 35-person sauna, four two-person cold plunges, and a membership model built around weekly 75-minute sessions.

In the meantime, McNeelands is building an audience with a mobile version of the experience, a 16-foot wood-burning sauna towed to events around the city so people can try the hot-cold loop before the permanent space opens.

In its first 10 days on the road, at run clubs, block parties, and pop-ups, 130 people came through the guided loop, and a later Sauna Sunday drew more than 100 people on a rainy day, including some of the Edmonton Elks.

McNeelands is building for a customer she knows from the inside, and one Canadian data says is struggling. Technology posted one of the lowest mental-health scores of any industry in the country last year, and the people running those teams are the ones McNeelands wants on the bench.

The burnout Canada barely measures

McNeelands started Toast in 2022 because the systems in tech weren’t built for the women working inside them, she says, and she ran it as CEO through its expansion into the U.S. The longer she spent trying to fix those systems from the inside, the heavier the work got.

“There’s definitely very big, very powerful systems that are not made for us,” she says. “The amount of burnout, the amount of women going on stress leave, the system is just so deeply embedded. It honestly felt most of the time, working in tech and also trying to reform tech, was like pushing a boulder up a mountain. It’s heavy, and it’s lonely.”

That experience is what Circa is built to answer.

“There’s a big connection between the burnout that people in tech experience and the solution that is being provided here,” she says.

The hot-cold ritual she’s built the business on goes back centuries, rooted in Nordic and Finnish sauna culture where a sweat followed by a cold lake or snow has long been part of life. Contrast therapy alternates the two, with time in a sauna widening the blood vessels and a cold plunge narrowing them.

The longest-running research on the health effects of sauna use comes from a study out of eastern Finland that followed more than 2,300 middle-aged men for two decades. It found that men who used a sauna four to seven times a week had lower rates of sudden cardiac death and all-cause mortality than those who went once a week.

Cold does something different. Immersion drives a sharp rise in norepinephrine, the surge behind the alertness people report after a plunge. A 2025 systematic review from the University of South Australia, drawing on more than 3,000 participants, found that cold-water immersion reduced stress in the hours after exposure and improved sleep quality, with no measured effect on mood and a short-term rise in inflammation.

The stress the research measures is showing up sharply in Canada’s technology workers. Canada does not track that burnout cleanly because no public study isolates the corporate technology sector, and the closest signals come from broader data that breaks the industry out as a segment.

TELUS Health’s Mental Health Index scores the mental health of 3,000 working Canadians out of 100. In early 2026, it put the technology industry at 59, the third-lowest of any industry, down 4.5 points in six months and one of the steepest declines in the survey. Professional, scientific and technical services, by contrast, held at 69.

Across the wider workforce, about a third of workers report feeling anxious, a third isolated, and a third say their mental health is dragging on their work, with anxiety and isolation the weakest measures for nearly four years.

Robert Half, a global talent and recruitment firm, tracks the wider trend across all industries, and its 2025 survey found 47% of Canadian professionals reporting burnout, up from 42% a year earlier and 33% in 2023.

The numbers point to a real need, and the people building businesses to meet it keep coming from the same place McNeelands did.

She points to Othership co-founder Robbie Bent, an early Ethereum employee, and counts herself in the same group. These are people who worked in tech, felt what the pace does to a person, and went looking for a better way to manage it. When she describes the customer Circa is for, she is describing the version of herself that first walked into a sauna in Toronto.

“I was that person in tech saying, ‘save me,’” she says.

How the numbers work

The social sauna category is pulling in venture money that a business built on saunas and cold water would not obviously attract. 

McNeelands says the model charges premium wellness prices while running on far less labour than a spa. A traditional spa needs close to one staff member per customer, she says, while a 35-person sauna room runs on one instructor and one front-of-house, which puts the nearest comparable in boutique fitness, where the sauna and the plunge are the workout and the membership is the model.

Circa is raising a friends-and-family round and has $650,000 committed against an original $700,000 target, which it is now expanding to $850,000. Othership in Toronto has raised over $8 million to fund its U.S. expansion, and Bathhouse in New York raised $35 million in a single round led by Imaginary Ventures, the firm behind Skims and Glossier.

McNeelands is also clear that the target market is not the one people picture.

When people hear wellness, she says, they picture a women’s spa, but the urban version draws a different, and more male, crowd. She got into it through Kevin, whose colleague was an early Othership investor.

“It’s less of a spa and more of a kind of weekly ritual, or something that’s part of your everyday fitness routine,” she says.

At Toast she put money behind paid advertising to build an audience fast, and at Circa she is doing the exact opposite.

“This is a marathon, not a sprint,” she says. “There’s more value in a smaller audience that is highly engaged and can convert than there is in a large audience that is passive.”

Until Circa’s physical location is built, the mobile trailer serves as the company’s marketing vehicle, getting people through the hot-cold loop to build demand before the studio opens.

Alongside it, Circa will run an unplugged supper club through the winter, a phones-away dinner series meant to build community, with one dinner planned at a Japanese restaurant where guests take off their shoes.

The plan from there is unhurried, with a second location self-funded by year three and a third by year five. McNeelands is also not franchising for now because she wants control of the experience. 

From software to a physical space

The move into a physical space is one McNeelands has thought through in detail, and it starts with what she learned about where technology is heading.

“I started Toast well before ChatGPT, well before AI was democratized in the way it is,” she says. “The barriers to entry on building an AI company, building a software company today are so low.”

Where software once gave a company something defensible, she says that edge is gone. As AI floods the world with digital content, she sees the value shifting to what it can’t replicate, like a sauna, a cold plunge, or human presence in a room. 

“We’ve basically eliminated any competitive moat,” McNeelands says. “Having physical infrastructure is a competitive moat, but it’s obviously capital intensive upfront compared to building software.”

McNeelands is also considering building technodelics into Circa, a category of wellness technology that uses sensory input, synchronized sound, light, and vibration, to shift the body into a calm, parasympathetic state, aiming to mimic the feeling of a psychedelic without any drug. She came across the idea in the RE:SET chair at Supernatural, a Toronto longevity studio where users recline in a zero-gravity chair wearing an eye mask and headphones through a guided session.

“The first time I did the RE:SET chair at Supernatural, I thought, wow, that can cure depression,” she says. She hasn’t committed to it, weighing it against simpler options like massage, but a proprietary sensory experience would be harder for a competitor to copy than a room with a sauna in it.

This is one of many details she obsesses over, and anyone who knows her has seen this before. She did the same thing at Toast, sweating the small parts of the experience that most people would never notice, because to her that is the whole point. What makes people come back is in those details, and paying attention to them is how she works.

Building a physical space has also stretched her in a way software never did. At Toast she could run the whole business herself, while a sauna means trades and systems she has to defer to.

“I definitely cannot install an HVAC system,” she says, laughing.

The situation reminds her of moving from human resources into product management years ago, when she stood up the first software development team at ATB Financial without a technical background.

“We were speaking two different languages, but I got by because I could ask the right questions,” she says. “I had a strong vision, and I leaned on the experts.”

Why Circa is launching in Edmonton

The idea for Circa came from something McNeelands ran into as a customer. Back in Edmonton last November, she wanted a sauna and called around, but the places advertising one were selling something else. Nothing in the city ran the guided hot-cold loop she had relied on in Toronto.

“You see a lot of people moving away, finding the thing that’s really cool, and then coming back and bringing that to the community,” she says. “That was really the moment where I thought, ‘why not me, why not us?’”

She and her husband Kevin were both raised in Edmonton and left about 12 years ago, and they are moving back to build. They left, found something good elsewhere, and are bringing it home, and she is betting on having a first-mover advantage in Edmonton.

She calls the city one of the largest underserved wellness markets in Canada, with no thermal concept operating at the scale she’s planning, and she’d rather prove the model in a lower-cost city with a young, growing population than fight for space in Toronto or Vancouver.

There is a sober dimension to it as well. Edmonton’s social life runs heavily through bars and restaurants, while alcohol consumption in Canada has fallen for four straight years, with the steepest drop among younger adults. 

Circa is betting that people will choose a sauna and a cold plunge with friends over a night at the bar.

For McNeelands, it’s personal before it’s commercial. She is building the place she went looking for when she was burning out in tech, and opening it in the city she left, for the people still living at the pace she knows.

Final shots

• Marissa McNeelands spent a decade in tech before opening Edmonton’s first social sauna, and she is building it for the people she worked alongside, the high performers with 75 minutes a week for themselves.
• Circa is one of a wave of social saunas drawing real venture money, a category betting that a physical room people gather in is worth more than the apps that used to attract that capital.
• McNeelands and her husband Kevin left Edmonton 12 years ago and are moving back to open Circa there, choosing a smaller Canadian city over Toronto or Vancouver on a bet that it has room for whoever builds first.