Meditation app Simple Habit sells to wellness marketplace Ingenio, pivots the company to Sleep Reset

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 rebrand itself to Sleep Reset —eponymous to a sleep-focused app it launched last year.

Simple Habit was founded by Yunha Kim in 2016 with the aim to be the “Netflix of Meditation”. The company got $12.5 million in total funding from various investors including Y-Combinator and Foundation Capital. The app boasts more than 5 million users.

Last year, Kim launched Sleep Reset as she saw that, while only 10% of content on Simple Habit was related to sleep, it brought in 70% of engagement. The new paid app was developed in partnership with experts from the University of Arizona, the University of Minnesota, and the Stanford University Sleep Medicine Center to develop its program. It took a no-pill approach and brought Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) in an app form. Users who subscribed to the app got a dedicated coach to improve their sleep.

Kim told TechCrunch that since the launch last year, more than 8,000 users have paid for the app. She said that with $155,000 in revenue last month, the app is set to clock $1.86 million in its first year. She also said that the company has improved sleep and habit logging on the app and doubled the number of sleep coaches since the launch.

“In the nine months since we came out of beta, we’ve more than doubled our subscriber base and our revenue. We’ve made updates to our program which have driven increased engagement and our efficacy data remains very strong, with the average program graduate reporting over an hour more of sleep per night, and 53% less time needed to fall asleep,” she said.

Ingenio has a rather intriguing curve as a company. It was founded as Keen.com in the 90s — a platform to connect users to psychics for readings. In the 2000s, the company rebranded itself and launched the personal guidance platform Ingenio and sold it to AT&T. In 2013, it was sold to San Francisco-based Alpine investors.

Since then, it has acquired multiple media properties like Horoscope.com and Astrology.com. In 2021, Alpine spun off Ingenio with a continuation fund. The company has a blog post that says Apollo is an investor, but there are no details in the post (Apollo owns Yahoo, which owns TechCrunch). When asked about Apollo’s investment, Ingenio pointed to an Alpine press release about the single-asset continuation vehicle for the company, which doesn’t mention Apollo.

Bryan Leppi, Ingenio’s Chief Corp Dev Officer, told TechCrunch over an email that the company is acquiring Simple Habit to bolster its holistic wellness portfolio. He mentioned that Simple Habit — which has more than 90,000 active users — will continue as a product and Kim will join Ingenio’s advisory board.

Simple Habit will continue as a stand-alone product as well as a further wellness content layer for Ingenio’s global brand footprint. The meditation and audio wellness content from Simple Habit may be added to apps like Keen to expand access to healthy habit formation and balanced lifestyles,” Bryan said. 

Ingenio or Sleep Reset didn’t comment on the size of the deal.

Kim said that Sleep Reset as a company will focus on better personalization for different kinds of sleep problems with advice from sleep experts on the team.

Meditation app Simple Habit sells to wellness marketplace Ingenio, pivots the company to Sleep Reset by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Course Hero scoops up Scribbr for subject-specific study help

For an undisclosed price, Course Hero has acquired Scribbr, a proofreading and editing service for academic writing. This is Course Hero’s latest deal in a string of buys – including CliffNotes, LitCharts, QuillBot and Symbolab – all powered by a duo of financings that saw the edtech platform valued at $1.1 billion.

Founded in 2012, Scribbr says it has an international network of 700 editors that offer a variety of services, from edits, to notes and clarity checks. The deal will help Course Hero expand its footprint in Europe, since Scribbr is a Netherlands-based business. Overall, Scribbr’s focus specifically compliments Course Hero’s 2021 buy of Quillbot, an AI tool that helps clarify writing that feels somewhat reminiscent of Grammarly.

Course Hero CEO Andrew Grauer has explained that the mission of his company is to create a question-and-answer platform with extreme levels of specificity for students. It sells subscriptions to students that unlock access to all of its learning and teaching content, which include course-specific material created by teachers and publishers.

The startup wants to be subject-agnostic, meaning that it can connect students to any specialty that they need advice in, whether it’s a niche grammar rule or a one-off algebra question. In some ways, that feels like the future of education: students shouldn’t have to piecemeal together advice, and even better if it’s on-demand help. Edtech companies that help the same students across different subjects can even poke out consistent gaps in their understanding. What if a company could tell a middle-schooler that they constantly get stumped when it comes to inferential questions?

The flipside, though, is hard to ignore. Just because a student wants to come to Course Hero for math help, doesn’t automatically mean that they want to come to the company for a summary of the Shakespeare reading. That reality can take away from Course Hero’s assumed goal of creating a stickier, more useful product for customers.

Graeur’s response to that concern is that he says he doesn’t plan to rush the integrations between the new, and different companies within the Course Hero umbrella.

“We start with the thesis of ‘let’s be decentralized, let’s empower and continue the entrepreneurialism of building out those individual companies,” Graeur said. “And then if and when there’s these moments, and you’re gonna start to see more and more of integration of different content, tools and services between the offerings at the right moment in time.” The answer suggests that Course Hero wants to play a backseat, and more of a platform role in these companies’ lives, versus combining and paywalling them to drive more subscriptions.

And to take a minute to believe the founder, who started the company in 2006 and only recently began using venture capital as a leverage to grow the core business, it does appear that every acquisition continues to stand alone in its own, specific world. There’s more to come, he tells me, which means that we’ll see what the edtech’s appetite looks like as it scales.

“We’re a company of relatively more independent, autonomous brands,” he said. “There is so much amazing opportunity for integrating each other’s technology and services with each other. And the question is how to stack rank those and prioritize them.”

Join the tens of thousands of people who subscribe to my newsletter, Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Microsoft promises to keep GitHub independent and open

Microsoft today announced its plans to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. Unsurprisingly, that sent a few shock waves through the developer community, which still often eyes Microsoft with considerable unease. During a conference call this morning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, incoming GitHub CEO (and Xamarin founder) Nat Friedman and GitHub co-founder and outgoing CEO Chris Wanstrath laid out the plans for GitHub’s future under Microsoft.

The core message everybody on today’s call stressed was that GitHub will continue to operate as an independent company. That’s very much the approach Microsoft took with its acquisition of LinkedIn, but to some degree, it’s also an admission that Microsoft is aware of its reputation among many of the developers who call GitHub their home. GitHub will remain an open platform that any developer can plug into and extend, Microsoft promises. It’ll support any cloud and any device.

Unsurprisingly, while the core of GitHub won’t change, Microsoft does plan to extend GitHub’s enterprise services and integrate them with its own sales and partner channels. And Nadella noted that the company will use GitHub to bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services “to new audiences.”

With Nat Friedman taking over as CEO, GitHub will have a respected technologist at the helm. Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of Xamarin has, at least from the outside, been a success (and Friedman himself always seems very happy about the outcome when I talk to him), so I think this bodes quite well for GitHub. After joining Microsoft, Friedman ran the developer services team at the company. Wanstrath, who only took over the CEO role again after its last CEO was ousted after harassment scandal at the company, had long said that he wanted to step down and take a more active product role. And that’s what’s happening now that Friedman is taking over. Wanstrath will become a technical fellow and work on “strategic software initiatives” at Microsoft.

During today’s call, Friedman also stressed Microsoft’s commitment to keeping GitHub as open as it is today — but he also plans to expand the service and its community. “We want to bring more developers and more capabilities to GitHub, he said. “Because as a network and as a group of people in a community, GitHub is stronger, the bigger it is.”

As for the product itself, Friedman noted that everything GitHub does should be about making a developer’s life easier. And to get started, that’ll mean making developing in the cloud easier. “We think broadly about the new and compelling types of ways that we can integrate cloud services into GitHub,” he noted. “And this doesn’t just apply to our cloud. GitHub is an open platform. So we have the ability for anyone to plug their cloud services into GitHub, and make it easier for you to go from code to cloud. And it extends beyond the cloud as well. Code to cloud. code to mobile, code to edge device, code to IoT. Every workflow that a developer wants to pursue, we will support.”

Another area the company will work on is the GitHub Marketplace. Microsoft says that it will offer all of its developer tools and services in the GitHub Marketplace.

And unsurprisingly, VS Code, Microsoft’s free and open source code editor, will get deeply integrated GitHub support.

“Our vision is really all about empowering developers and creating a home where you can use any language, any operating system, any cloud, any device for every developer, whether your student, a hobbyist, a large company, a startup or anything in between. GitHub is the home for all developers,” said Friedman.

It’s unclear whether all of these commitments today will easy developers’ fears of losing GitHub as a relatively neutral third-party in the ecosystem.

Nadella, who is surely aware of this, addressed this directly today. “We recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement,” he said. “We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos operate independently and remain an open platform. We will always listen to develop a feedback and invest in both fundamentals as well as new capability once the acquisition closes.

In his prepared remarks, Nadella also stressed Microsoft’s heritage as a developer-centric company and that is it already the most active organization on GitHub. But more importantly, he addressed Microsoft’s role in the open source community, too. “We have always loved developers, and we love open source developers,” he said. “We’ve been on a journey ourselves with open source and the open source community. Today, we are all in with open source. We are active in the open source ecosystem. We contribute to open source project and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open-sourced when it comes to our commitment to all source judges, by the actions we have taken in the recent past our actions today and in the future.”