While working as a journalist, VVOX founder Sangeeth Sebastian went through a traumatic break-up in his personal life due to a sexual difficulty, which took a toll on his mental health, leaving him lonely, isolated and depressed. Doctors to whom he went for consultation were clueless about sex themselves and were interested only in prescribing unnecessary medicines and providing false and unscientific diagnosis and advice, just for money. He realised this, when he reached out to a trained sexologist in the US and all it took was one good counselling to solve the issue.

​

The experience had a profound impact on his life. His subsequent efforts to know more about sexual difficulties made him realise that there are millions of people like him who needs help. Many of them suffered in silence due to shame, stigma, lack of sexual awareness and access to trained sexologists.

For the next 12 years, he spent his time reading, researching and writing on sexuality to bring greater awareness on the subject and to start a conversation around it. In 2015, Sebastian won the inaugural Likho Awards for excellence in media for his investigative expose on Delhi doctors who claim to ‘cure’ homosexuality (three years before the Supreme Court of India decriminalised gay sex) through a highly discredited and unethical practice known as conversion therapy. The connections he built, over the years, with some of the top sexologists, from India and abroad, eventually led to the founding of VVOX.