Founded in 2021, Indigo is an NYC-based venture studio focused on incepting and developing startups within niche verticals of alternative medicine, mental health, and inner-transformation. They’ve coined this as “ConsciousTech”. Indigo has recently announced $1 million in funding to develop and deploy its first startups within the space.
Founded in 2021, Indigo is an NYC-based venture studio focused on incepting and developing startups within niche verticals of alternative medicine, mental health, and inner-transformation. They’ve coined this as “ConsciousTech”.
“Indigo’s mission is to create tech companies that support inner-change, reduce suffering and foster human flourishing. As we face social and environmental challenges, I believe our civilization needs to change, but change starts from within. ” said Pierre Giraud, Founder and CEO of Indigo.
Pierre Giraud is a purpose-driven entrepreneur who has scaled million-dollar companies prior to launching Indigo. His inner journey started at age 28, with a therapy that was the starting point of his passion for psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and spirituality.
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“Indigo’s mission is to create tech companies that support inner-change, reduce suffering and foster human flourishing. As we face social and environmental challenges, I believe our civilization needs to change, but change starts from within.”
Aiming to drive the space forward, Indigo has recently announced $1 million in funding to develop and deploy its first startups. Indigo is backed by conscious investors and successful entrepreneurs within the ecosystem.
The number of companies that have been created within this space has been steadily growing, along with investment. Last year, $5 billion was invested in mental health alone and almost $1 billion in Psychedelics. Alongside historical investors in the mindfulness space such as Evolve Ventures and Bridge Builders Collaborative, specialized VCs have recently popped up.
- Integrated Fund, a NY-based early-stage fund focused on holistic health – founded in 2019.
- Empath Ventures, a psychedelics-focused VC firm – founded in 2021.
- Wisdom Ventures, an SF-based VC focused on personal growth and wellbeing – founded in 2022 by Soren Gordhamer, the founder of the Wisdom 2.0 conference
To create these businesses, Indigo leverages a community of 500 scientists, entrepreneurs, and operators to ideate opportunities before seeking the ideal CEO/Co-Founders to take the reins.
As venture builders, one of Indigo’s most important phases is de-risking the business – which is led by Jay Lubin, who serves as Partner and Chief Venture Architect at Indigo.
As a former founder, Jay leverages his expertise within the startup and investment ecosystem to focus on his passion: identifying impact-driven business opportunities within Health and Wellbeing. Prior to Indigo, Jay handled over $85 Billion in AUM as a Portfolio Manager before working in venture capital within the Fintech space. He goes on to say,
“We are very meticulous within the de-risking phase. We’ve developed a multi-layer process to assess all factors that correlate with business opportunities: market size, competitive landscape, unit economics, and regulatory/compliance factors are some of the key elements we analyzed”
Indigo emphasizes the importance of onboarding a seasoned and well-suited co-founder to take the CEO position of a spin-out. Indigo vets and selects entrepreneurs to join an “Entrepreneur in Residence” Program where they co-build the community with the Indigo team. During the program, Indigo supports the entrepreneurs with funding, playbooks, product development, branding, design, growth, weekly management calls, and countless introductions.
