UK-based Unmind announced a USD $47 million Series B round of venture capital funding for its employee mental wellness app. This brings its total raised to $63.2 million.
Unmind’s co-founder and CEO Nick Taylor is a clinical psychologist. It’s an important distinction to make in the rapidly emerging work tech category of mental wellness. During Worktech’s briefing with Nick and team, we were impressed by the commitment to clinical research and insights that make up the foundation of the Unmind app. Don’t discount Nick’s business savvy. Having started the company well before the COVID-19 pandemic, Unmind is no opportunistic endeavor. They’ve been making the case for mental wellness to CEOs since 2016. So, while building out capabilities that put the worker and their wellbeing at the center of its design, Unmind has also built out analytics that correlate mental wellness to business results and ROI. You can see this in its core messaging everywhere.
For HR leaders, the commitment to correlating the company’s investment in mental wellness programs to business results should take as much weight as the commitment to embedding mental wellness into the flow of work. Little happens, and even less sustains, in the enterprise without a correlation or tie to business results. Whether you’re dealing with the most jaded or pessimistic CEO, or whether you’re dealing with the most supportive of these efforts, both personas need to see the impact delivered for the dollars spent.
While during the pandemic CEOs became a driving force behind the adoption of mental wellness benefits and apps, as we return to work HR leaders need to be ready with insights reflecting “how it’s going.” For an analogy, look no further than remote and distributed work. Remote work was the first workplace trend accelerated by COVID and is now the first to get market scrutiny from those more jaded and pessimistic CEOs.
Just as the CHRO led the business response through COVID, so will they need to be ready to defend any policies and investments made during that time.
WorkTech Founder, George LaRocque
Mental wellness is an increasingly noisy space, and Unmind is up against some well-funded competition. We can’t predict the future for Unmind, but we would recommend HR leaders consider any work tech that leans into a correlation to business results.
$2.7 billion was invested globally in work tech during 2021 Q1 alone. Get WorkTech’s free report and analysis here.