Calm, a meditation aid software in the United States, announced the completion of a $75 million Series C funding round, valuing the company at $2 billion. Calm will use the funds to flesh out the site's content and strengthen its balance sheet.
The investment was led by the company's original investor, venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, and followed by private equity funds Insight Partners, TPG Capital, Goldman Sachs Group and so on. It's worth mentioning that Marc Benioff, CEO of enterprise services software giant Salesforce, was also involved in the investment, and his company just spent $27.7 billion to acquire Slack, an enterprise chat and team collaboration app.
Last February, Calm raised $88 million in funding, valuing the company at $1 billion. Then, in July, Lightspeed announced a $27 million investment in Calm, which had accumulated $115 million in Series B funding. After this Series C round, Calm's cumulative funding reached $217 million. (For details, see The Magnificent Chronicles Historical Report: ;)
Founded in 2012 by Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith and headquartered in San Francisco, USA, Calm is a paid subscription software focused on people's mental health. Currently, the annual fee for calm software is $69.99. Calm uses a variety of relaxation features such as meditation, sleep aids, light music, soothing exercises, expert classes, and scenario simulations to help users improve mental health issues such as anxiety, stress, and insomnia.
In 2018, Calm launched the "Bedtime Stories" series, which was well received by many users. He recorded the story with American actor Matthew McConaughey (who starred in "Interstellar" and "Dallas Buyers Club") and British actor Stephen Fry (who starred in "V-Kills" and "Sherlock Holmes 2: The Shadow Game").
Calm has maintained a high growth rate and even achieved profitability during the pandemic. From a venture capital perspective, startups focused on mental health are doing well.
Calm says the site has been profitable since 2016. In 2018, Calm's sales grew 400% year-over-year to $150 million, with one new user joining every second, adding an average of 75,000 new users per day. Currently, the number of downloads of Calm software has increased from 40 million in February 2019 to 100 million, and the number of paying users has increased from 1 million to 4 million.
The outbreak has somewhat increased Calm's investment appeal, and researchers have warned that the outbreak could be psychologically traumatic. A recent study by Pew Research suggests that people who are unemployed during the pandemic may feel more pain. Calm's competitor, Headspace, which also works as meditation software, offers unemployed people a free subscription to its platform.
Calm responded by releasing a free resource page and partnering with healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente, which will offer its members a free premium subscription to calm software.
Calm has established an enterprise services branch called Calm for Business, which may generate stable revenue for the company and strengthen its consumer business. Calm is considering acquiring smaller companies.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > about Lightspeed Venture Partners </h1>
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in California, USA, with offices in China, India and Israel. Lightspeed invests in startups and growth companies in countries such as the United States, Europe, Israel, China and India in a variety of sectors: enterprise, consumer, big data, Bitcoin, enterprise technology, cleantech, mobile, internet, financial technology, cloud solutions, e-commerce, storage, media, networking, energy and software, information technology, biotechnology and social networking.