Ginger and Headspace are making a gigantic mental health platform

Two big apps in the mental health space are coming together like a wellness Voltron.

Headspace Health is a planned merger between:

• Headspace: A Santa Monica-based meditation app with 70m users, and 2.1k companies using its B2B option.
• Ginger: A San Francisco-based app that offers video therapy with licensed practitioners, plus behavioral health coaches you can text. Over 25m people have access to Ginger through health plans.

Combined, they’ll offer online mental health services including science-backed mindfulness and meditation tools, coaching, therapy, and psychiatry.

Headspace Health expects to reach ~100m people across 190+ countries through both D2C apps and 2.7k+ enterprise and health plan partners. And it’ll be worth an estimated ~$3B, per Yahoo Finance.

Online mental health services surged amid the pandemic

Headspace doubled its subscriber count while Ginger’s revenue tripled. Meanwhile:

• Meditation app Calm saw downloads increase 3x
• Therapy app Talkspace saw 144% YoY growth in Q1 and went public in June

But is it here to stay? And does it work?

University of Memphis researchers found therapeutic interventions worked just as well online, and even better for women.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was found to be just as effective online, though some techniques were better in person.

Online therapy can also be more accessible. There’s no commute and users can connect with any doctor in their state, making it easier to find professionals from certain demographics or with specific focuses.

Btw, if you’re looking for some mental wellness yourself, Healthline listed its top 10 favorite apps.