Y Combinator and Foundation Capital-backed meditation app Simple Habit has been acquired by Alpine Investors-backed wellness marketplace company Ingenio. Because of this deal, Simple Habit will rename itself to Sleep Reset – eponymous with a sleep-focused app it launched last year.
Simple Habit was founded in 2016 by Yunha Kim with the goal of being the “Netflix of Meditation”. The company received a total of $12.5 million in funding from several investors, including Y Combinator and Foundation Capital. The app has more than 5 million users.
Last year, Kim launched Sleep Reset because she saw that while only 10% of the content on Simple Habit was related to sleep, it generated 70% of the engagement. The new paid app was developed in collaboration with experts from the University of Arizona, the University of Minnesota and the Stanford University Sleep Medicine Center to develop the program. It took a pill-free approach and brought cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) in an app form. Users who subscribed to the app received a dedicated coach to improve their sleep.
Kim told AapkaDost that more than 8,000 users have paid for the app since its launch last year. She said that with sales of $155,000 last month, the app will clock in at $1.86 million in its first year. She also said the company has improved sleep and habit logging in the app and has doubled the number of sleep coaches since launch.
“In the nine months since we came out of beta, we’ve more than doubled our subscriber base and revenue. We’ve made updates to our program that have increased engagement and our efficacy data remains very strong, with the average program graduate reporting more than an hour more sleep per night and taking 53% less time to fall asleep. fall,” she said.
Ingenio has a rather intriguing curve as a company. It was founded as Keen.com in the 90’s – a platform to connect users with psychics for readings. In the 2000s, the company changed itself and launched the personal guidance platform Ingenio and sold it to AT&T. In 2013 it was sold to Alpine Investors of San Francisco.
Since then, it has acquired multiple media properties such as Horoscope.com and Astrology.com. In 2021, Alpine Ingenio became independent with a continuation fund. The company has a blog post saying that Apollo is an investor, but there are no details in the post (Apollo owns Yahoo, which owns AapkaDost). When asked about Apollo’s investment, Ingenio pointed to a press release from Alpine regarding the single-asset continuation vehicle for the company, which does not mention Apollo.
Bryan Leppi, Ingenio’s Chief Corp Dev Officer, told AapkaDost via email that the company is acquiring Simple Habit to expand its holistic wellness portfolio. He said Simple Habit – which has more than 90,000 active users – will continue as a product and that Kim will join Ingenio’s advisory board.
“Simple Habit will continue as a standalone product and as a further wellness content layer to Ingenio’s global brand footprint. Simple Habit’s meditation and audio wellness content can be added to apps like Keen to expand access to healthy habit formation and a balanced lifestyle,” said Bryan.
Ingenio or Sleep Reset have not commented on the size of the deal.
Kim said that as a company, Sleep Reset will focus on better personalization for different types of sleep issues with advice from sleep experts on the team.