Calm

Calm sells a subscription app built around guided meditation, sleep content and mental wellness, and has added an employer and health plan business. Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew founded the company in 2012 in San Francisco, where it is still based. Calm.com began as an online relaxation resource and moved to mobile in 2013. The company later bought Ripple Health Group in February 2022, which led to the launch of Calm Health, its clinical mental health offering, in October 2022. David Ko is the current chief executive.

Calm raised very little capital in its first years. In June 2014 it added $578,000 from Jason Calacanis's LAUNCH fund and AngelList syndicate, Matt Mullenweg and Matt Cheng, bringing its total to just over $1 million, and seed funding eventually reached about $1.5 million. In 2018 Insight Venture Partners led a $27 million Series A at a $250 million pre-money valuation, with Ashton Kutcher's Sound Ventures participating. In February 2019 TPG Growth led an $88 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, joined by Creative Artists Agency and existing investors Insight and Sound Ventures, taking total funding to $116 million. In December 2020 prior investor Lightspeed Venture Partners led a $75 million round at a $2 billion valuation, with Insight, TPG and Marc Benioff participating.

Calm is still private, with no IPO or sale announced. At the time of the 2019 round the company said it was profitable, had topped 40 million downloads and more than one million paying subscribers, and was on track for $150 million in annual revenue after quadrupling revenue in 2018. By December 2020 it reported more than 100 million downloads and 4 million paying users. The company employed 310 people in 2022.

Calm shows how far a capital efficient consumer subscription business can get before taking institutional money. The company ran on about $1.5 million of angel and seed funding for roughly six years, so LAUNCH and the other early angels entered at a valuation far below the $250 million mark Insight paid in 2018. Insight went on to see that mark rise eightfold in under three years to the $2 billion priced by Lightspeed's 2020 round. Because the company is still private more than a decade after founding, none of those gains has been realized through a public listing or sale, and holders have waited a long time for liquidity.