COMPANY

Name: Pause

Location: Santa Monica, CA

Founded: 2017

Founder(s): Carl Eckert and Shubh Jagani

Website: https://www.pausewellness.co/

Social Media Following: 40 followers on LinkedIn 

INDUSTRY – Corporate Wellness

Size: $5.3B in 2018 (Source: Zion Market Research – Global Corporate Wellness Market)

Projections: $8.6B by 2025 (CAGR of 7%) (Source: Zion Market Research – Global Corporate Wellness Market)

Introduction

Pause is a Meditation-Space-as-a-Service startup based in Southern California and serving New York, Silicon Valley, and downtown Los Angeles. At present, this B2B2C company is promoting soundproof and ergonomic meditation pods for offices, and an AI-driven companion app to personalize and recommend a wellness and meditation regime. Pause claims to help employees have better mental health and be more productive at work.

The Product 

Pause Pods are digitally connected meditation centers designed to be private, soundproof, and feng shui compliant to offer a comfortable space for employees to meditate and destress at work. These Pods are paired with an AI-driven companion app that interfaces with FitBits to help employees improve sleep, reduce stress, and increase happiness. The combination of these two touchpoints is designed to encourage ‘performance-based’ meditation and mind-care at work, with a consequential improvement in productivity. 

Pause also offers employers the ability to track the mental and physical health of their employees at an aggregated level. By tracking their employees on these metrics as well as across their use of the Pods, they can evaluate the kind of pressure the employees are under without being too intrusive. The system also helps them see trends in productivity and match them to their use of Pause products and meditation.

Origin and Founding Team 

Pause was founded in 2017 by Carl Eckert and Shubh Jagani. Carl is a graduate from Colgate University in Philosophy who then spent 4 years working in Leveraged Finance and Asset Management at CIT and Brookfield Properties respectively. Shubh is a graduate in Systems Design from the University of Waterloo who was a Product Manager at Yelp until February 2019.

The company comes from Carl’s obsession with changing the way people live and work. He saw how companies were making ping pong tables and beer kegs available as a way to improve employee engagement and satisfaction but employers were doing little to help with mental health. He felt that the office was a perfect space to meditate, especially since the outcome would be employees taking better care of their mind, body, and other people. Shubh brought his experience on product optimization to bear as he worked to design a good UX for Pause.

Performance and Trends

Pause is working with prominent employers such as Asana, Brookfield, Convene, Google, and Gensler, and has recently concluded its participation in the Arcadis City of 2030 Accelerator in Amsterdam, powered by Techstars. The program concluded at the end of May, 2019. During the demo, Carl claimed that 84% of the employees in their beta meditated at least 6 times a week, and that their pre-seed round was oversubscribed. 

Techstars and an unknown angel round in January 2017 are the only known sources of funding at present.