MindFI CEO Bjorn Lee
MindFi, a corporate mental health and wellness startup based in Singapore, announced today it has secured an oversubscribed US$2 million seed funding round.
Existing investor, Singapore-based early-stage VC firm M Venture Partners, and backer of Aussie tech unicorn Canva and NYS-listed Slack, Global Founders Capital, joined the round.
Other angels are Carousell co-founder Marcus Tan, Carro executive Kenji Narushima, Spin co-founder Derrick Ko, among others in the US and Asia.
The fresh funding will enable MindFi to accelerate its AI-driven product development as well as cultural localisations in key markets among its present-day 20 markets across the Asia Pacific.
Last August, MindFi raised US$750,000 in pre-seed funding from a slew of investors, including iGlobe Partners and M Venture Partners, fresh off its admission into Y Combinator’s (YC) Summer 2021 programme.
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Founded in 2017, MindFi’s cross-platform mobile app delivers 24/7 guided self-care programmes, community-driven features such as forums and group therapy, and intelligent matching with diverse coaches and therapists.
HR leaders and corporate clients can access anonymised analytics to measure and support their employees’ health and productivity. The app also generates personalised recommendations, which are based on a user’s unique Human Wellbeing Profile (HWP). These profiles aggregate mental health data from MindFi app usage, such as moods and stress levels, with self-reported assessments, physical health data from wearables, such as sleep, heart rates and daily activity, as well as guidance from culturally-intelligent care providers.
The firm counts Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups such as Visa, Willis Towers Watson and Patsnap among its corporate clients, which are able to access Mindfi’s services in 16 languages.
Since completing the YC programme in September 2021, MindFi said that it has tripled the company’s employee headcount and recorded 5x annual revenue growth.
MindFi fosters the vision of “culturally competent” wellness in APAC, where cultural values such as interpersonal harmony, loss of face, and filial piety strongly influence people’s receptivity to mental health services and support.
“A mental health solution for Asia cannot be copy-pasted over from other regions,” explained MindFi CEO Bjorn Lee. “Wellbeing is multi-dimensional, and we seek to build a localised understanding of wellbeing that takes physical and cultural differences into account.”
Professor Kua Ee Heok of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS, echoed this viewpoint as she said that technology products need to account for the unique cultural beliefs, mores, nuances and feelings of their users in order to deliver the best types of utility value on a regular basis.
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To date, MindFi claims the usage of its app-based mental health and wellness programmes are 10 times higher than traditional teletherapy services.
The pandemic has boosted the global demand for mental health support in the last two years. According to the World Health Organisation, new depressive and anxiety disorder diagnoses spiked 400 per cent in 2021.
As per Singapore Mental Health Study conducted in 2016, despite one in seven Singaporeans experiencing mental health hurdles at some point in their lives, only a quarter of those seeks treatment for it. The digital health industry, therefore, is gaining momentum in Singapore, which is estimated to increase at a 6.94 per cent annual rate (CAGR 2022-2025) and results in a projected market volume of US$2,8 billion by 2025.
Recently, MindFi and Fitbit have teamed up on the joint pilot study to examine the impact of workplace stress among Singapore’s educational community during this pandemic period.
This January, Singapore-based Intellect, another YC-backed mental health startup, also secured US$10 million in a Series A financing round.
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Image Credit: MindFi
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