British mental health startup MYNDUP has raised £300,000 in an oversubscribed third round of seed funding. Founded in February 2020, the company has now received £500,000 in investment and grants since December last year, with investors recognising MYNDUP’s innovative offering and potential for further growth.
MYNDUP aims to end the one-size-fits-all approach to mental health by offering live one-to-one video sessions covering the entire mental health spectrum, ranging from therapy and counselling through to life coaching and meditation. Founder Joel Gujral created the company after his own experiences with workplace mental health provision, which was difficult to access, limited in its scope and failed to cater to a diverse range of needs.
The company will use the funding to accelerate its growth in the UK and beyond, which will include hiring new staff and further enhancing the depth of provision available to businesses and individual customers. A key element of this will be the development of an AI-driven algorithm that will help match a user with a practitioner.
The capital was raised by a variety of angel investors from Deutsche Bank, the London Stock Exchange Group and BP. Arpit Gupta, former Head of Marketing at Microsoft and current Global Vice President at The Juice Plus+ Company, also invested for a second time.
Joel Gujral, founder and CEO at MYNDUP, said: “We’re grateful to all of our investors for this latest funding round, which will be instrumental in financing our ongoing growth and helping us to change even more lives around the world for the better.”
“The last 18 months have shone a light on just how important mental health is. Data on our own customers shows that 57% of sessions booked between October and December 2020 were for therapy or counselling, up from just 18% between January and March 2020. It’s clear that people found repeated lockdowns and isolation tough, particularly around Christmas time.”
“Meanwhile, life and executive coaching was the most popular category of support over 2020 as a whole, showing the diversity of the mental health spectrum and the fact that one-size-fits-all approaches just don’t do the job.”
He concluded: “We’re here to change perceptions and revolutionise the way people approach mental health. Thanks to this latest investment, we can move closer to achieving that vision.”