At a time when mental health problems are rapidly escalating, Headspace and Ginger have a solution: mega-merger.
Meditation app Headspace is merging with teletherapy platform Ginger to create a combined company called Headspace Health. The agreement values the joint venture at $3b (10x this year’s expected revenue) and will give Headspace Health the ability to begin offering affordable mental health services to over 100 million people globally.
- Headspace – The company is best known as one of the first guided meditation apps and remains a leader in mindfulness training. Headspace has partnerships with many consumer-favorite brands such as Netflix and Spotify, giving many of those suffering from anxiety and depression their first exposure to accessible care.
- Ginger – Ginger offers its members access to mobile-first mental healthcare, including behavioral health coaching and telehealth therapy. It has an on-demand, team-based care model, giving users 24/7 access to therapists.
- Headspace Health – The newly formed company will blend Headspace’s 65m+ user base with Ginger’s evidence-based interventions, creating an easy way for patients to improve their well-being from a unified platform. Headspace Health will also have one of the world’s largest mental health data sets, which it will leverage to deliver highly personalized care.
Industry Impact
Headspace Health plays at the intersection of the mental health crisis and telemedicine, two areas that have been attracting significant investor attention. With so much capital flowing into the space, consolidation was soon to follow, and this merger could kick off a wave of similar deals involving other popular meditation apps such as Calm.
Competing acquisitions aren’t the only change foreshadowed by the merger. Headspace Health was originally the name of Headspace’s 2018 digital therapeutic product that failed to receive FDA approval, and it’s now easier to see how federal clearance, and reimbursement, could be on the horizon.