Y-Combinator and Foundation Capital-backed mediation app Simple Habit has been acquired by Alpine Investors-backed wellness marketplace company Ingenio. Because of this deal, Simple Habit will rebrand itself to Sleep Reset —eponymous to a sleep-focused app it launched final 12 months.
Simple Habit was based by Yunha Kim in 2016 with the goal to be the “Netflix of Mediation”. The company received $12.5 million in whole funding from numerous buyers together with Y-Combinator and Foundation Capital. The app boasts greater than 5 million customers.
Last 12 months, Kim launched Sleep Reset as she noticed that, whereas solely 10% of content material on Simple Habit was associated to sleep, it introduced in 70% of engagement. The new paid app was developed in partnership with specialists from the University of Arizona, the University of Minnesota, and the Stanford University Sleep Medicine Center to develop its program. It took a no-pill strategy and introduced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) in an app type. Users who subscribed to the app received a devoted coach to enhance their sleep.
Kim advised TechCrunch that since the launch final 12 months, greater than 8,000 customers have paid for the app. She mentioned that with $155,000 in income final month, the app is ready to clock $1.86 million in its first 12 months. She additionally mentioned that the company has improved sleep and behavior logging on the app and doubled the variety of sleep coaches since the launch.
“In the 9 months since we got here out of beta, we’ve greater than doubled our subscriber base and our income. We’ve made updates to our program which have pushed elevated engagement and our efficacy information stays very robust, with the common program graduate reporting over an hour extra of sleep per evening, and 53% much less time wanted to go to sleep,” she mentioned.
Ingenio has a relatively intriguing curve as a company. It was based as Keen.com in the 90s — a platform to join customers to psychics for readings. In the 2000s, the company rebranded itself and launched the private steerage platform Ingenio and offered it to AT&T. In 2013, it was offered to San Francisco-based Alpine buyers.
Since then, it has acquired a number of media properties like Horoscope.com and Astrology.com. In 2021, Alpine spun off Ingenio with a continuation fund. The company has a weblog submit that claims Apollo is an investor, however there are not any particulars in the submit (Apollo owns Yahoo, which owns TechCrunch). When requested about Apollo’s funding, Ingenio pointed to an Alpine press release about the single-asset continuation car for the company, which doesn’t point out Apollo.
Bryan Leppi, Ingenio’s Chief Corp Dev Officer, advised TechCrunch over an electronic mail that the company is buying Simple Habit to bolster its holistic wellness portfolio. He talked about that Simple Habit — which has greater than 90,000 lively customers — will proceed as a product and Kim will be part of Ingenio’s advisory board.
“Simple Habit will proceed as a stand-alone product in addition to an additional wellness content material layer for Ingenio’s international model footprint. The meditation and audio wellness content material from Simple Habit could also be added to apps like Keen to increase entry to wholesome behavior formation and balanced existence,” Bryan mentioned.
Ingenio or Sleep Reset didn’t touch upon the dimension of the deal.
Kim mentioned that Sleep Reset as a company will concentrate on higher personalization for various sorts of sleep issues with recommendation from sleep specialists on the workforce.
