MindFi, Asia’s leading corporate mental health and wellness platform, today announced an oversubscribed US$2 million seed funding round that saw participation from existing investor M Venture Partners and Global Founders Capital fund, a backer of Canva and Slack. Carousell co-founder Marcus Tan, Carro executive Kenji Narushima and Spin co-founder Derrick Ko also joined the round, among other prominent angel investors in US and Asia.
The fresh funding allows MindFi to accelerate its AI-driven product development, localise in key markets, and further pursue its vision of ‘culturally competent’ wellness in a region where cultural values such as interpersonal harmony, loss of face, and filial piety strongly influence people’s receptivity to mental health services and support.
Mayank Parekh, Partner at M Venture Partners, remarks: ‘Mental health has been traditionally overlooked in most countries, but more so in fast-growthAsia. We feel the market is currently poorly served, and as founder-first investors, we are thrilled to work with the MindFi team, who together bring complementary skills and insight to solve a significant problem.’
MindFi delivers 24/7 guided self-care programmes, community forums and group therapy, and intelligent matching with diverse coaches and therapists – all in a single mobile app. HR leaders and corporate clients can access anonymized analytics to measure and support their employees’ health and productivity. The app’s personalized recommendations are based on a user’s unique Human Wellbeing Profile (HWP), which aggregates mental health data from MindFi app usage, such as moods and stress levels, with physical health data from wearables, such as sleep, heart rates and daily activity.
Since completing the Y Combinator program in September 2021, MindFi has tripled its employee headcount and recorded 5x annual revenue growth. The platform now operates in 20 markets across APAC, where its services can be accessed in 16 languages. Corporate clients include Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups, such as Visa, Willis Towers Watson and Patsnap, and to date, usage of MindFi’s app-based mental health and wellness programs is 10 times higher than traditional teletherapy services.
‘A mental health solution for Asia cannot be copy-pasted over from other regions,’ explains Bjorn Lee, CEO of MindFi. ‘Well-being is multi-dimensional, and we seek to build a localised understanding of wellbeing that takes physical and cultural differences into account. To achieve this, we leverage self-reported assessments, wearable data, guidance from culturally-intelligent care providers and so much more. Ultimately our goal is to drive the #MindFitness movement and champion a future where people are empowered to take charge of their mental well-being.
‘MindFi addresses great interethnic differences by combining a unique community-based approach with native data insights, clinical and technological understanding, and lived experiences,’ says Erica Johnson, founder of Modern Health and Strategic Advisor to MindFi.
Professor Kua Ee Heok of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS, and MindFi’s Medical Advisor, explains: ‘While there is a scramble for new health solutions in Asia, the region is very diverse in culture, language and illness behavior. 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. I am glad that MindFi is committed to this vision.’
