Digital psychological well being firm Headspace Health introduced Thursday it has acquired the Shine app, a psychological wellness platform centered on culturally competent and inclusive choices.
Based in 2016, Shine offers self-guided content material, together with meditations and self-care programs on subjects like stress and limits, in addition to digital group workshops.
The corporate’s cofounders and co-CEOs Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi will tackle management roles in Headspace’s product and advertising groups. Some Shine engineers and leaders in its consumer successes and advertising teams can even transfer to Headspace.
“The acquisition of the Shine app underscores the persevering with significance of infusing variety, fairness, inclusion and belonging into the material of every thing we do,” Headspace CEO Russell Glass mentioned in a press release. “By integrating each the strong content material and proficient group from Shine, we’ll be capable of collectively scale the range of choices and experiences that we are able to deliver to our clients and members.”
THE LARGER TREND
Headspace Well being is the results of the merger between meditation app Headspace and digital psychological well being firm Ginger, which closed in October last year.
The Shine deal is not the corporate’s first acquisition this yr both. In January, Headspace introduced it had acquired Sayana, maker of AI-enabled psychological health-tracking and sleep apps. When that deal was introduced, Headspace pitched the Sayana acquisition as a manner so as to add AI capabilities to personalize content material primarily based on the consumer’s wants.
Psychological well being continues to be a leading clinical area in digital health funding, regardless of the number of competitors in the space. A Rock Well being report on the digital well being funding panorama by the primary half of the yr famous merger and acquisition exercise has slowed in contrast with 2021. However the report’s authors famous in July that the quantity might choose up.
“Like funding numbers, we don’t foresee a return to 2021 M&A tempo, although we anticipate 2022’s M&A exercise to develop steadily from 2020 baselines,” Ashwini Nagappan and Adriana Krasniansky wrote. “We’ll be watching to see if well-positioned digital well being corporations in more and more saturated segments of digital well being begin to purchase smaller opponents – which might imply the largest waves of digital well being consolidation are simply getting began.”
ON THE RECORD
“After six years of constructing Shine, we’re thrilled to hitch Headspace Well being to scale the pressing work of closing the fairness hole in psychological well being – one thing Naomi and I’ve typically felt first-hand,” Shine’s Lidey mentioned in a press release.
“We imagine that everybody deserves to really feel included of their psychological well being journey, and with our mixed group at Headspace Well being, we’re on an thrilling path to realize that shared imaginative and prescient.”
