Aumio Raises €3 Million to Support Children’s Mental Health Through Playful Learning

‍The time for parenting tech is now.

Tech cannot solve everything, but when you see the accumulation of factors that recently made parents willing to try new things to help their littles ones’ deal with mental health struggles, you really hope it can do something.

The COVID-19 caused unimaginable loss, trauma, and isolation, challenging our collective mental health and wellbeing. According to a recent report by  UNICEF on child, adolescent, and caregiver mental health, the pandemic may represent the tip of a mental health iceberg. 

In addition, the mental health consequences of digital toxicity have been creeping up over the past decade but the pandemic helped rocket the unfortunate reality along. Today, every third child suffers from mental health problems like anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more. 

Now, their parents are fortunate to never have faced some of these challenges before, which means they can feel helpless or without the right tools to face these issues - they just don’t have their own personal experiences, or that of their caretakers, to lean on. 

As the state and community is now too overwhelmed to provide the assistance many parents need, new tools need to come for help. If you take Germany, for example (where Aumio started its operations), there’s only one school psychologist for every 6,000 children. The waiting time for a therapy session easily exceeds six months! 

That’s where Aumio works its magic.

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Finding the perfect solution

We started to actively search for the driven founders we would trust in building a product that resonates with their audience. Surprisingly, that was not an easy task. We were convinced that you would need a product that lent itself to the ‘double audience’ of caretakers and children: a product that catered to both. 

Then we met the team behind Aumio and fell in love with their vision of launching a new era of entertainment that is fun for children, and that parents can experience at the same time and see it beingmindful and beneficial for their kids’ mental health.

"We are seeing a new generation of parents and educators who care deeply about providing their children with high-quality experiences and child-centered content. With Aumio, we want to become the Disney for mental health."  - Tilman Wiewinner, co-founder of Aumio. 

Let’s face it: building a tool to help support caretakers and their children is not an easy feat and a big responsibility. In other words: it takes a stellar team with a high level of empathy and a strong professional experience in the field - and the team at Aumio has just that!

Jean is a clinical psychologist and an expert in children’s mindfulness who has had early awareness of kids’ mental troubles. He kickstarted Aumio and brought Tilman onboard early on, who was becoming a meditation instructor parallel to running digital businesses at the time.

Behind the playful design of Aumio is Felix, who has years of experience in children-centric design products and is an agile children’s rights activist.

Simon: a data nerd who has built and developed a handful of global startups over the years (and who just became a happy dad!) is the mastermind behind the impressive user feedback loop and engagement success rates. 

If you speak VC jargon, then you know that what I’m telling you is that we found the perfect founder-market fit in the Aumio team! 

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The team is stellar - but what about the product?

So, why are we so bullish on Aumio? 

In classic taxonomy, you could say Aumio is a gamified mental health training app for children, providing daily therapeutic audio exercises and sleep stories all in a playful way. Aiming to become the next Disney of mental health, all of the content has been developed and vetted by psychologists and clinicians.

The app is meant to be used by parents and children together. When they open the app, they can ‘jump on’ to a vessel that brings them to a ‘learning universe’: a place out of the ‘physical world’ where the characters modulo the language and speak to children in a multicultural environment.  

As the universe doesn’t lend itself to a specific market, the ‘learning universe’ is an extremely scalable product. The team has been able to roll out the full English version in less than three month, also showing great promise for future expansion. 

On top of that, we’re extremely impressed with the engagement and retention metrics of the Aumio app: they completely surpassed all competitors we have seen on the market! 

With the current funding round, Aumio will triple its team of 10 employees and expand across Europe and in the US. More than 200,000 families already use the meditation and sleep app in the DACH region. The vision of the founding team is to develop Aumio into the first global mental health platform for the entire family within the next five years. 

OK enough talking from me - just check the app here and see for yourself what all the buzz is about!

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