Meditopia, the most downloaded mental coach in non-English speaking markets, has today announced a Series A investment of €13.1 million co-led by the VC firms Creandum (an early backer of Spotify, iZettle, and Klarna) and Highland Europe.
Founded in 2015, and with a presence in Istanbul and Berlin, Meditopia is helping to address the growing global mental health crisis through its highly-tailored, localized, long-term range of mental wellbeing programs. The young company works with trained professionals in each of its 75 regions to develop bespoke plans which are tailored to the specific and nuanced needs of that culture, language or country.
Until now, most meditation and mental health apps were built and written to largely suit the needs of English-speaking, Western groups, making them less useful for other demographics from different cultures and countries. Meditopia believes that cultural differences in the way topics like sexuality are perceived around the world, mean that mental wellness services should provide resources or approaches that are designed for that culture.
Meditopia Co-founder Berk Yilmaz explained: “Our mental wellbeing is deeply rooted in our culture and the events happening around us, the way we speak, people we interact with, the community we live in,politics and so on. These are the main factors that affect our peace. Therefore mental wellness needs to be handled locally, personalized to our local needs and culture.”
Since launching in 2017, Meditopia has created an unrivalled collection of resources, offering the most programs in the most languages – almost 3,000 pieces of content in 10 languages – than any other mindfulness and mental wellness platform globally.
Meditopia employs therapists, psychologists, meditation experts, and writers from each region to create highly-tailored content designed around specific themes or in response to global or regional events. An example includes contents created before and after Brazil’s Rio Carnavale in which Meditopia used the platform to coach people through managing their emotions around the disastrous flooding that was simultaneously taking place during this cultural event.
Through its agile, mental coaching approach, these programs combine the benefits of a deep-dive mindfulness experience with comprehensive tools designed to meet the short to long-term needs of the mind. In three years, Meditopia has grown to 14 million users across 75 countries and has experienced 10x year-on-year growth in sales.
Co-Founder Fatih Celebi stated: “From the beginning, Meditopia has strived to be at the frontier of the mind, taking a unique and customised approach to every country, culture, and language that it serves. Sources of stress and anxiety may be universal, however the way they are discussed and perceived is often very specific to each culture, country, or language. We don’t believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution to mental health and with Meditopia we’re helping to provide for the long-term deeply personal, complex needs of people across the globe.”
Carl Fritjofsson, Partner at Creandum, commented: “The social media age we have experienced enabled users an endless focus on others. We’re now experiencing a new wave of technology which allows users to turn their focus inwards on themselves. We’ve followed Meditopia for the past two years and have been incredibly impressed by how they’ve been able to capture this opportunity across the world, all while being one of the most capital-efficient run companies around.”