Meditation app Calm said to be raising $25M to become the “Nike of the mind”

___

This med­i­ta­tion app is now worth $250 mil­lion and has Trump-relat­ed stress to thank (CNBC):

“Med­i­ta­tion start-up Calm was so suc­cess­ful dur­ing a chaot­ic and stress­ful 2017 that Apple rec­og­nized it as the app of the year.

“Well done, Calm,” Apple said in December.

Now the San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny, which to date has only raised $1.5 mil­lion in seed financ­ing, is being reward­ed by investors. Insight Ven­ture Part­ners is lead­ing a fund­ing round that val­ues Calm at about $250 mil­lion, accord­ing to sources famil­iar with the mat­ter. The total fund­ing will exceed $25 mil­lion, said the sources, who asked not to be named because the deal has­n’t closed and won’t be announced for a few weeks.

Found­ed in 2012 by Michael Acton Smith, who pre­vi­ous­ly cre­at­ed video game com­pa­ny Mind Can­dy, and ser­i­al entre­pre­neur Alex Tew, Calm more than tripled its sales last year and was gen­er­at­ing $40 mil­lion in annu­al rev­enue by the end of 2017, Acton Smith told CNBC in a Decem­ber inter­view. That num­ber has since jumped to $60 mil­lion, sources said … As of three months ago, Calm had about 20 employ­ees run­ning what Acton Smith described as a very prof­itable dig­i­tal busi­ness with grand ambi­tions to expand well beyond guid­ed med­i­ta­tion and become a giant con­sumer brand. Phys­i­cal world prod­ucts like books, cloth­ing, a Calm Hotel and per­haps a Calm Island some­day are all part of the vision. He called Calm the “Nike of the mind.”

News in context

• The State of Mind­ful­ness Sci­ence: 10 Key Research Find­ings to Encour­age and Guide your Med­i­ta­tion Prac­tice in 2018
• Learn­ing how to mind­ful­ly nav­i­gate mind­ful­ness apps
• Five rea­sons the future of brain enhance­ment is dig­i­tal, per­va­sive and (hope­ful­ly) bright
• Dig­i­tal brain health firm Head­space rais­es $34 mil­lion to scale up med­i­ta­tion ser­vice and trans­form mind health
• Dig­i­tal Men­tal Health: the Hurt, the Hype, the Hope, with Dr. Tom Insel
• Info­graph­ic on the Dig­i­tal Brain Health Mar­ket 2012–2020