Headspace (digital health platform)

Headspace

Type	Privately held company
Industry	Healthcare
Founded	2010 (London, UK)
Founder	Andy Puddicombe Rich Pierson
Headquarters	Los Angeles
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Mobile App, Books, Website
Number of employees	50+
Website	www.headspace.com

Headspace is a digital service that provides guided meditation sessions and mindfulness training. Its content can be accessed online, or via their mobile apps. In April 2016, Headspace claimed to have over 6 million people using the app.

Headspace was founded in May 2010, by Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson. Puddicombe is a former Buddhist monk, and Pierson has a background in marketing and new brand development.

Puddicombe cut short his university studies in Sports Science at the age of 22, and travelled to Asia to become a Buddhist monk. Over the course of ten years, his meditation training took him to Nepal, India, Burma, Thailand, Australia and Russia. He was fully ordained at a Tibetan Monastery in the Himalayas. In 2004 he returned to the UK on a mission "to make meditation accessible, relevant and beneficial to as many people as possible". It was whilst running a meditation clinic in London that he met his future business partner, Rich Pierson. “We both thought, how could we present meditation in a way that our friends would genuinely give it a try? Rich had all these creative skills, and I had the experience as a monk. I think that was the light bulb moment with Headspace, the coming together of those two backgrounds”.

Headspace began as an events company, holding mindfulness talks in and around London. Demand from attendees for a way to share these techniques led to Puddicombe and Pierson looking into developing a mobile app, with the first version of the Headspace app launching in 2012. Headspace now employs over 50 staff, working between the company HQ in Los Angeles and London, UK.

Headspace provides guided meditation resources online; accessible to users through the company’s website and via a mobile app on the iPhone and Android platforms. Users can access ten days of free content, after which they have the option to take out a monthly or annual subscription or continue with the free trial material. The techniques taught through the programme combine elements of both calming and insight meditation. In June 2014, Headspace launched version 2 of its platform. In the first 6 months since release the company signed up twice as many users as it did in the previous two and a half years, and served them 125 million minutes of meditation practice.

Content in version 2 of the app is clustered into four areas once users have completed the Foundation stage - health, performance, relationships and Headspace Pro. The app's interface shows different levels of meditation and employs gamification. Users are asked to complete and master a level of meditation before they can move on to the more advanced section. Each session is about ten minutes long, usually in a video format.