KCRise Fund has invested in a Columbia startup that helps users reduce stress and anxiety through virtual and augmented reality meditation experiences.
Healium’s patented technology pairs with fitness trackers and an EEG headband so users also can visualize their biometric data, such as heart rate and brainwave patterns.
With the solar system experience, users who lower their heart rate will be visually rewarded with the solar system lighting up. If their heart rate gets too high, the solar system darkens.
“It’s gentle feedback to train yourself on how to lower your heart rate. You’re not just seeing it as a flat number that’s stuck to your wrist on your smart watch. That data is spatialized and set out into an environment. You can see it and interact with it,” Healium co-founder and CEO Sarah Hill said.
Another meditation rewards users who reach a calm state with butterflies hatching from their cocoons and flying around the room. The startup offers 35 different meditation experiences through its monthly app subscription, including 360-degree nature-based escapes from a live-action camera, as well as mystical worlds, such as a crystal forest or floating through the aurora borealis with whales. While some feature narrations, others have music and nature sounds. Hill described it as healing media.
“It’s a drugless way to learn to self regulate,” said Hill, who recently was named a fellow in Kansas City-based Pipeline Entrepreneurs, an intensive, yearlong entrepreneurship fellowship.
Hill, a former TV journalist, started developing the technology in 2016 with Dr. Jeff Tarrant to help her cope with the traumatic things she’d seen as a reporter. Her background and personal connection to the technology is one reason KCRise Fund invested in the startup’s latest $3.6 million seed round, which included investors such as Mayo Clinic, Missouri Technology Corp. and Captain Partners & Astronaut Holdings, among others.
Healium also signed a know-how license with Mayo Clinic, which means the health care entity will provide subject matter expertise and collaborate on immersive mental health and fitness tools.
Healium, which employs 10 across Columbia and Kansas City, will use the seed funding for marketing, integrating with more wearables and hiring more employees in roles such as engineering, marketing, customer success and sales.
KCRise Fund Managing Director Ed Frindt said Healium has been on the venture capital fund’s radar for a while. It’s a novel concept, he said.
“We felt like she was ahead of her time in terms of a drugless approach to stress and anxiety,” Frindt said.
The fund thinks Healium will become an attractive acquisition target, and there’s an added benefit of supporting a startup that’s improving others’ lives. The Covid-19 pandemic also amplified awareness around the importance of mental illness and addressing it with tools such as Healium, he said.
“This technology is unique enough that it’s caught the attention of the biggest tech companies in the world,” Frindt said.
Healium previously built virtual and augmented experiences for Google, and it was selected for the Apple Entrepreneur Camp. It also won the 2022 NFL Players Association pitch challenge, the Procter & Gamble Ventures Innovation Prize and the 2022 CES Innovation Award.
The technology’s effectiveness has been clinically validated in seven peer-reviewed journals. Healium has been shown to reduce anxiety and improve mood in as little as four minutes, she said. Its customer base includes schools, such as Kansas City University, the military and hospital systems, which are using the technology to reduce nurse and doctor burnout. A teacher in Ohio started using the technology with a student who regularly disrupts class.
The teacher told Hill that she uses a clicker to track the number of disruptions, which can be as high as 85 in a single day. When she used Healium with the student in the morning, he only disrupted the class three times.
