Gary Moon is the Managing Partner at Nfluence Partners, a mission-aligned boutique investment bank built to handle complex mergers & acquisitions and capital formation advisory services for companies at the intersection of technology and the broader economy.
Gary is a headline speaker at this year’s TransTech conference Nov. 13-14. He will also lead an investors-only session to provide a first look at the 2020 coverage report that maps the Wellbeing Tech landscape and Mission Aligned Investing in this sector.
What trends are you seeing in the consumer and enterprise wellness industry this year?
Before COVID, investors were at the early stages of investing in the area. As wellness at some point started to move into the digital arena, it was fairly early days in most sectors, albeit with an increasing level of interest. What’s happened with COVID is that what normally might have been a 3- to 4- year growth/interest cycle has compressed into 9 to 12 months. Across the board, whether you want to call it a mental health crisis or opportunity, everybody is recognizing that mental and emotional wellbeing is an order of magnitude more important than they thought it was in February of 2020. We see companies doubling in revenue, sometimes more, just based on the fact that this is now very top of mind as an acute issue.
What are the milestones that we should be looking for that would tell us when the broader adoption is accelerating?
Big IPOs, big mergers and acquisitions, big financings – those things don’t happen if the dogs aren’t eating the dog food. The one that is on everybody’s mind is Teledoc Health buying Livango in a $18.5 billion deal in August. That is a bet that adoption is going through the roof, partially driven by COVID. Meanwhile, companies like Calm and Headspace have a very strong ability to raise additional capital. And there are others that we know of that haven’t publicly announced significant financings. And the thing that I look for when I talk to companies is their sustainable revenue growth over 50%. That’s usually a good sign.
Is wellbeing there yet?
I think it’s definitely getting there. The mental health crisis is just going to get worse, so the need for some of these solutions continues to increase. And I think we’re getting pretty close to the point where adoption begets adoption, the network effects start to kick in. Yes, I’m pretty bullish. One trend that I think is super interesting is the merging of physical and the digital as you look at human wellness. Increasingly, we’ll see holistic solutions where we can go to the physical domain, but it’s all tied together with our data and there are different modalities of how somebody reaches us across the wellness spectrum. That’s the big idea that I expect a few people will be pursuing, depending on what pocket of the market they come from.
What are some of the obstacles that need to be addressed?
I think the siloed nature of specific modalities is a bit of a problem. Because when you try something and it has little utility, you’re not going to try the next 19 things. Also, the “legitimization” of some of those on-the-cusp technologies. For example, four years ago it was difficult to get companies to talk about meditation, whereas today it’s dramatically different. It’s harder to be skeptical when it’s actually been proven through trials. There’s a constellation of success now that acts as a tailwind for other companies to be successful.
