The co-founder of one of New Mexico's most well-known companies has plans for another immersive endeavor — this one focused on health and wellness rather than art and entertainment.
Corvas Brinkerhoff, who helped form the Santa Fe-based artist collaborative Meow Wolf and turn it into a multi-state company with more than 1,000 employees across four unique exhibitions, said Monday he's leaving the New Mexico company to launch Submersive.
Set to partially open in Austin, Texas, in 2026, Submersive is intended to create what Brinkerhoff, the startup's founder and CEO, called a new category of immersive experience, "immersive wellness." The 25,000-square-foot location would combine saunas, steam rooms, pools and cold plunges with an array of lighting, sound, video and interactive technology.
Submersive is designed, Brinkerhoff said, to "get people into elevated states of being."
"Where as a species we've built these beautiful ancient traditions of public bathing, Submersive is reinventing bathing and using the tools of immersive experience to create really wondrous, multi-sensory wellness experiences," Brinkerhoff said.
Part of Brinkerhoff's inspiration for launching Submersive comes from his experience at Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese bathhouse in Santa Fe. He said he's been going to the bathhouse since he moved to Santa Fe nearly two decades ago.
"The whole time I've lived in Santa Fe, I've been cultivating this deep obsession with immersive experience design — with my creative practice, with Meow Wolf and other projects," Brinkerhoff said.
He'd visit Ten Thousand Waves in the evenings after working on his creative practice and with Meow Wolf during the days.
"I thought, 'There must be some really interesting ways to bring these two worlds together,'" Brinkerhoff said.
"As an artist, there's something really interesting and exciting about being able to use elements of water, temperature, buoyancy to add to our painter's palette to create even more rich, multi-sensory experiences," he continued.
Click through the below gallery to see renderings of what Submersive could look like.
It'll cost $15 million to build Submersive, Brinkerhoff said. He added financing for the immersive spa will come from a mix of sources, including angel and institutional investors and loans, and the company is actively raising for the Austin location.
Brinkerhoff didn't disclose Submersive's specific location in Austin but said a location announcement could come before the end of this year. The first half of Submersive is set to open in 2026, with a full opening planned in 2028.
Once opened, the startup expects to attract about 200,000 visitors annually, with ticket prices around $88 per person.
Submersive has a "core team" of seven people. Brinkerhoff said the company is currently hiring for a few positions to support the business, including a brand and marketing position, real estate development, executive assistants and other business-focused roles.
One of Submersive's team members is Beau Lotto, Ph.D., a well-known neuroscientist and the startup's lead scientific advisor who's helping integrate neuroscience into the design of the immersive spa. Other Submersive advisors include Chip Conley, founder of the Modern Elder Academy; B. Joseph Pine, a technology economist; and Susan Magsamen, the founder and executive director of the Immersive Arts and Mind Lab.
Submersive
The business connection between Santa Fe's Meow Wolf and Austin's Submersive
Brinkerhoff, a founder of Meow Wolf, acted as the Santa Fe-based company's chief technology officer, senior vice president of experience design and executive creative director behind "Omega Mart," an interactive grocery store exhibition that opened in Las Vegas in early 2021.
"All the founders are artists. None of us had any formal business training," Brinkerhoff said about Meow Wolf. "We had to learn how to use the tools of business, because those were the right tools to support our ambition to create these really massive-scale art projects."
That 15-year experience with Meow Wolf, turning an artist collective into an established company, provided an "incredible education in how to combine creative practice with business."
"It's a huge advantage, starting out, to have that experience," Brinkerhoff added about now launching Submersive. "I often think about what it'd be like to be starting Meow Wolf if we knew now what we didn't know then."
Meow Wolf's growth hasn't come without some bumps. The company laid off around 200 employees at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and, in April, announced another round of 150-plus layoffs, in addition to 10% expense cuts. Jose Tolosa, Meow Wolf's CEO, said the company's continued expansion plans are "unaltered" by those moves.
Like Meow Wolf's expansion into other locations — the New Mexico company opened its first full exhibition in Santa Fe in 2016 before expanding to Las Vegas and Denver in 2021 and then moving into the Dallas-Fort Worth area last year, with another exhibition set to open in Houston later this year — Brinkerhoff said he envisions taking Submersive to more cities besides Austin in future years.
"Our intention is to prove the concept in Austin and then build these around the country and around the world," he said.
And, also like Meow Wolf, Submersive fits into the immersive entertainment industry and the broader location-based entertainment industry. Some reports show the immersive entertainment market could grow by nearly 25% per year through 2030, fueled by a bump in travel and spending following the Covid-19 pandemic.
For Submersive, in particular, the "value proposition" goes beyond other immersive entertainment experiences, Brinkerhoff said, because of the spa's focus on health and wellness and "potential for lasting benefit."
