With fresh capital from its recent initial public offering, mental-health content creator LifeSpeak Inc. is eyeing acquisitions to accelerate its growth.
Founded in 2004, LifeSpeak sells a library of more than 2,000 videos to employers, who give workers access to content about subjects related to mental health.
The Toronto-based company says it has more than 200 clients, including Fortune 500 companies, insurance firms and government agencies. LifeSpeak’s software-as-a-service platform receives stable, recurring revenue from clients, which usually sign multiyear contracts. LifeSpeak says its content is focused on preventing mental-health crises, rather than addressing them afterward.
“We can be the front door of [mental-health] education around the world,” chief executive officer Michael Held said. “Being that first place in people’s health journeys, we believe there’s a real opportunity [to] acquire companies that fit with our business model … and continue people on their mental-health and well-being journey.”
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LifeSpeak chair Nolan Bederman said acquisitions will drive the company’s growth plan, with a focus on “bite-sized” deals.
LifeSpeak wants to buy “technology companies like our SaaS platform that are in the B2B [business-to-business] world that have yet to be able to fully scale,” Mr. Bederman said. “What we will do with them is cross-sell them into our client base, but really use them as ways to extend what somebody can do with the education that they’re getting from us.”
Acquisition targets, while small, must have a clear path to profitability, he said.
“We’re looking for businesses that are either at, past or very clearly near profitability,” Mr. Bederman said. “We’re not venture guys by nature, so we didn’t go and raise hundreds of millions of venture money and sort of hope that revenue will turn into profits. We did it the other way – slow and painful.”
LifeSpeak will receive at least $83-million in net proceeds from its IPO, which raised a total of $125-million. Meanwhile, $35-million of gross proceeds will go to investors selling their shares in the IPO. Shares began trading on Tuesday, opening at $10 and dropping 14 per cent to close at $8.50.
The company will also use the proceeds to expand its video library, which features mental-health experts who guide viewers through various subjects in short clips. Mr. Bederman calls LifeSpeak “a cross between Netflix and MasterClass” and said it owns all of its content.
“We’re going to have eight separate [video] shoots this year. We used to do two to three every year,” Mr. Bederman said. “We’re going to triple the amount we’re spending on content development and triple the amount we’re spending on the technology side as well.”
LifeSpeak is a veteran in the burgeoning digital wellness industry, in which upstarts such as Talkspace, Calm and Headspace have raised millions in venture capital in recent years. Mr. Bederman said LifeSpeak is a competitor with these companies but also a potential partner.
“It’s a market of frenemies,” he said. “We’re all competing sort of, but at the same time we actually can work with all of them. … Some of the strangest partners on paper anyway will actually walk us right into clients, because they know that if we do it together we’re not duplicative to what they do.”
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