Toronto-based employee mental health and wellness education startup LifeSpeak had closed a $42 million CAD equity investment. The investment represents LifeSpeak’s first institutional round of financing.
“The current health crisis has highlighted the difficulty organizations face in addressing the needs of the anxious, remote workforce.”
The round was led by and is the first investment of Round13 Capital’s Growth Fund, which provided $18 million, after launching earlier this year. Kensington Partners and Roynat Capital also participated in the investment. Sanjiv Samant, founder and managing partner of the Round13 Growth Fund, told BetaKit LifeSpeak will use the new capital to build out its sales and marketing team and grow the company.
“This is a classic late-stage growth equity round to help LifeSpeak accelerate its growth ambitions in the US and the UK, as it already has significant penetration in Canada,” Samant said.
LifeSpeak was founded in 2004 and targets its solution across 25 industries, ranging from financial institutions and telecommunications to governments and school boards. Until now, the startup has been funded by its co-founders, some senior executives, and a small number of individual and angel investors.
LifeSpeak’s platform offers more than 2,000 video training sessions, podcasts, tip sheets, and other content that covers topics such as preventative health and mental health. LifeSpeak’s hope is to be both a proactive and reactive solution to well-being and training needs.
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LifeSpeak claims that market demand for remote, digitally-enabled mental health and wellness solutions has grown substantially in recent years. In addition to increasing awareness of mental health issues from anxiety to suicide risk, the startup also attributed COVID-19 and an increasingly remote workforce as accelerants.
LifeSpeak is not the only Canadian tech company to offer services in the employee wellness space. Toronto-based healthtech startup Dialogue recently expanded to offer Employee Assistance Program services, which give employees quick, virtual access to practitioners across multiple disciplines, including mental health and financial services.
Inkblot Therapy, another Canadian healthtech startup that has developed an online platform that uses an algorithm to match a company’s employees to mental health counsellors, claims to have seen notable growth in corporate client sign-ups during the pandemic.
LifeSpeak currently has nearly 40 team members and offers its platform to enterprises and health plans in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
“The current health crisis has highlighted the difficulty organizations face in addressing the needs of the anxious, remote workforce,” said Michael Held, founder and CEO of LifeSpeak. “We’re excited to partner with our new investors to dramatically expand access to LifeSpeak’s platform across health plans and employers.”
Image source Unsplash. Photo by Brooke Cagle.
