Recent Mental Health market deals

The last few weeks have brought a lot of important news from the world of self-care and mental health. The market for apps that allow you to “take care of yourself” with the support of experts or special programs is growing every day and is attracting investment.

Let’s start with the unicorn news. At the end of January, the startup Lyra, one of the largest b2b players in the Mental Health niche, raised the E-round by $187M. This event is interesting in two ways: the startup raised its previous Series D investment of $110M just six months ago The new round of funding raised the total project estimate to $2.3B, and the amount of investment for 6 years of existence — to almost half a billion dollars.

Lyra offers corporate programs to support employees’ mental health: access to online sessions with psychotherapists and coaches, self-help exercises and emotional support tips. The startup’s sales rhetoric is built around the correlation between employee mental health and company-wide performance — Lyra even released a special research with revealing figures about this.

Another newcomer unicorn didn’t get very far from Lyra either: yesterday it was announced that Modern Health raised $74M in Series D, reaching a valuation of $1.17B. The startup reached its status faster than a colleague: the project is only 2 years old, and the previous round was closed 4 months ago. The principle of the platform’s operation is approximately similar to Lyra: a comprehensive offer for employees in the area of well-being and mental health, classes with psychotherapists and coaches, guides for self-exercise. The difference is in the general rhetoric: here they do not talk much about the business indicators of burned-out employees, but emphasize the mission of destigmatization of mental diseases.

But in addition to the giants, smaller projects with modest funding are also entering the markets. A couple of days ago, the startup Quilt raised $3.5M in a Seed Round. The project is interesting in its format: it is the notorious Clubhouse, but with a focus on self-care. It is assumed that with the help of an audio social network, the user joins a community in which they can receive emotional support. The current, but still sometimes beta version of the app was released in the AppStore at the end of January, but already shows 80% of the return rate of users every week. There is a special emphasis on the inclusivity of the community you enter in which you find yourself, on gender and racial diversity.

According to Crunchbase, over the past 5 years, investors have invested $1.1B only in American startups working with mental health, and experts estimate that the entire market for “psychological comfort” services by 2026 will reach $240B.