Headspace Health, the Santa Monica, California-based digital mental health ‘unicorn,’ is acquiring Shine, a wellness and mental health app.
Shine offers meditation videos and wellness courses through its app both directly to consumers and employers. The company said it has 45,000 paid subscribers and 90 enterprise customers.
Terms were not disclosed.
The deal will embed Shine’s content into Headspace Health’s apps. Shine co-CEOs Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi will join Headspace, assuming leadership roles on the company's product and marketing teams.
Lidey and Hirabayashi started Shine in 2016 to create a more inclusive wellness app. Lidey, a Black woman, and Hirabayashi, a half-Japanese woman, said they didn’t feel represented in the wellness industry’s offerings at that time.
“After six years of building Shine, we’re thrilled to join Headspace Health to scale the urgent work of closing the equity gap in mental health, something Naomi and I have often felt firsthand,” Lidey said in news release.
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Headspace is one of the biggest digital mental health companies in the startup world valued at $3 billion. The company came together when Headspace and Ginger merged in August 2021. Russell Glass, who was CEO of Ginger, was named top executive of the company.
Headspace markets its behavioral health coaching, therapy, and psychiatry services to employers and health plans, and its meditation and mindfulness content directly to consumers. Glass recently told Digital Health Business &Technology the company has 70 million members across 190 countries. But as the market tightens, the consumer landscape for subscription services is challenged, he said.
“Consumers are looking at every dollar because gas and food prices have gone way up,” Glass said.
Calm, one of Headspace’s competitors in the wellness app market, recently said it was cutting 20% of its staff to increase efficiencies. Glass said the company has not undergone layoffs but will slow down hiring in certain areas and is keeping an eye on costs.
This story first appeared in Digital Health Business & Technology.
