@ido thanks for the detailed explanation. if I understood you correctly you have mount states within a jar (with common deps), and you are getting mount.core.NotStartedState when you are trying to access these states from within an app that depends on those jars. (in case I understood the problem correctly) I would split my answer in two: 1. While it is not a usual usage of states, it should still work if things are required correctly: https://gist.github.com/tolitius/a5fe7dfab29be1402bd2f560a64e6900 2. I agree with @dm3 that it looks like you could solve it a bit differently. Rather then passing states around, you could have states depend on app configuration. i.e. your app will have a config.edn that would have various configs for kafka, db and such. i.e. https://github.com/tolitius/cprop