Wellbeing trend: ''Mo: meditation and sleep" app raises $1M

Andrei Molchanov and Alexander Gorny’s app “Mo: Meditation and Sleep” raised $1M last week. The deal terms and valuation of the startup were not disclosed by its founders or investors. Among the latter are Mail.ru Group co-founder Dmitry Grishin and a group of business angels.

The founders of the project, who come from the top management of Mail.ru Group, launched it two years ago and raisedtheir first external investment of ₽15M a year later.

The main product focus is on working with sleep and anxiety. The app offers 23 meditation programmes for this purpose, including, for example, to increase productivity or prepare for an important meeting. The team has plans to add online webinars and personal trainers to the functionality, and also to scale up to the Scandinavian markets.

The wellbeing and mental health sector is on the rise like never before: latest reports show that, as of the middle of this year, the record for funds raised in HealthTech startups has already been broken by half compared to last year. It is a continuing trend: according to CB Insights, funding for mental health startups in 2020 was 5.5 times the $275M invested by investors four years earlier. There were 124 deals last year, up from 69 in 2016.