I’m a mediocre meditator, at best. Some weeks I meditate every morning, and others go by without doing it at all. Turns out healthy habits are a lot harder to develop than good ones. I’ve tried a few different pieces of meditation hardware over the years, because who wouldn’t love to have a nice shortcut to mindfulness?
Of the products I’ve tried, Muse is the one that I found legitimately useful. Nothing is going to make you a great meditator overnight (or stick with it long-term), of course, but the product was useful in helping me establish a more regular practice.
This week, Muse’s maker, Interaxon (probably time to just change the company name to Muse), announced a $9.5 million Series C, led by BDC Capital, Sonny Vu’s Alabaster and Export Development Canada. The funding is on the low side, by 2022 standards, but it finds the Toronto-based firm reading the launch of a new subscription service set to arrive early next year.
From the sound of it, it’s a similar shift into a premium subscription service as the one Oura went through a while back. Here the company is leveraging the headband’s EEG readings to offer personalized insights and create a kind of global meditation database, where users can compare themselves to the average.
Per Interaxon:
The Company aims to leverage these patterns through the development of groundbreaking metrics that will provide users meaningful insights into brain health and lifestyle factors (i.e., meditation, sleep, alcohol, stress, exercise, diet, etc.) that affect it. These personalized insights along with other new biosensor trend reports will roll out later this year, and will be included in the new membership program.
The offering also seems to find the company looking at a kind of hardware as a service model, which run around $300 up front — no doubt a major barrier of entry for a product you really need to use to properly understand.
The company also recently announced an SDK initiative designed to utilize its brain-sensing technology for potential metaverse applications.