mental-fitness
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Wondermind Sold Mental Fitness for Everyone - Then the Startup Couldn't Make Its Own Numbers Work
Wondermind made mental health feel less like homework and more like a daily habit. Its free media reached millions - but a celebrity-sized launch could not protect a fragile business model from missed payroll, layoffs and an unresolved investor lawsuit.
Rhone
Rhone is a Stamford, Connecticut premium performance apparel brand founded in 2014, best known for pioneering men's activewear that bridges the gym, the office and everyday life. Built around proprietary technical fabrics and its signature Commuter collection, Rhone sells direct-to-consumer online and through a growing retail footprint while championing men's mental health through its Mind & Muscle events and partnerships with the NBA and LPGA.
Alexi Robichaux
Alexi Robichaux is the CEO and Co-Founder of BetterUp, the human transformation platform he started in 2013 after a soul-searching walk along the Camino de Santiago. He built BetterUp from a two-person idea into a $5 billion company with 2,800 employees and over $628 million in total funding, pioneering digital professional coaching for enterprises including Google, Salesforce, and NASA. A former product executive at VMware who once struggled with imposter syndrome and public speaking anxiety, Robichaux turned his personal journey with coaching into a mission to make elite professional development accessible to everyone.
Jesse Pickard
Jesse Pickard is the Founder and CEO of The Mind Company (formerly Elevate Labs), the studio behind Elevate (Apple's App of the Year 2014), Balance (Google's App of the Year 2021), and Spark - a portfolio of science-backed mental fitness apps with over 80 million downloads. A designer-turned-entrepreneur, Pickard co-founded language learning startup MindSnacks in 2010 before pivoting to build Elevate in 2014, pioneering the consumer mental fitness category. He is also an Investing Partner at Volo Ventures.
The Mind Company
The Mind Company is the San Francisco-based mental fitness studio formerly known as Elevate Labs. It makes science-backed mobile apps - Elevate for cognitive training, Balance for personalized meditation, and the new Spark puzzle app - that have together crossed 80 million downloads and collected Apple's and Google's App of the Year honors.
Lumos Labs (Lumosity)
Lumos Labs is the San Francisco company behind Lumosity, the brain-training app that turned cognitive exercises into a daily habit for more than 100 million people. Founded in 2005 by Kunal Sarkar, Michael Scanlon, and David Drescher, Lumosity packages neuropsychology-inspired tasks - memory, attention, processing speed, problem solving, flexibility - into short, gamified workouts. Its database of player performance, the Human Cognition Project, has fueled collaborations with researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, and beyond.