Venture Studio Indigo announces $1 million in funding to build ConsciousTech companies

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.

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.