1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripriya Mahesh, Founding Partner at Spero Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You want to give another example?

Shripriya Mahesh: Sure. Another example is a company called Core, which is a meditation company. We invested in Core at their seed round. They hadn’t launched as well, so it was based on a pre-product market fit.

We looked at the meditation space for a while. It’s a space that we care about deeply. I had dealt with an illness from 2017 to 2018, and my doctors recommended meditation. I had tried every app available, and what I found was that they were good, but they were very fungible.

Moving from one app to another, you got different sets of accents and different sets of teachers, but the experience is fundamentally the same. Despite them being successful, our question as investors was, “What does that mean to us from a moat standpoint? Can someone pull away? What’s the barrier to leave?”

As we know now, switching apps is easy. Interestingly, Core had a hardware device. It was beautifully designed even when we first met them. Most investors think that hardware is really hard, and it is compared to software.

If you look at this device, it does two things. One, if you hold it in your hands, it tracks your heart rate and HRV while you meditate which is great data. It also tracks your minutes of calm and your minutes of focus. It is blindingly accurate.

When you are doing breath training, it vibrates so that you don’t have to think about it. It does your counting and it sends you vibrations as it guides you. For a lot of people, the hardest part is a point of focus because meditation has become very hot, but most people will feel that they are bad at it.

There’s no such thing as being bad at meditation, but the reason people think that they are bad is because it’s hard to focus your mind. Core provides a point of focus with the vibration, and it also gives you data on how you are improving.

I felt that they finally had something that was using technology to bring meditation to the modern age. We thought that the hardware could be a moat. Since they launched, their average meditations per week and month are 5x their competitors.

It was also a fantastic team. I love the CEO Sarah McDevitt, who started the company because she had anxiety as she was leading Microsoft to come to Stanford’s program in both design and education. We invested before they had launched, and they just had a phenomenal launch.

They still have a long way to go, because they are a startup. That illustrates our thesis of investing in companies that have the ability to break the mold. We believe that this team can weather the roller coaster. 

Sramana Mitra: What are the price points of this one?

Shripriya Mahesh: Core has tried multiple price points since they launched this year, but right now, you can get the device and the subscription for $15 a month. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripriya Mahesh, Founding Partner at Spero Ventures
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