Why Eka invested in Paired
Paired Mission: Making couple relationships healthier and happier
If you ask most people what the key to their happiness is, they are likely to say good relationships! And the most important among these is often their relationship with their partner.
Despite relationships being key to health and happiness, to date there has been very little structured support to enable people to consistently improve on their relationship health.
Paired was started to solve this problem. Founders, Kevin & Diego recognised that there was an opportunity to create a new category that was focused on helping couples have healthy relationships through daily interactions focused on improving relationship communication.
Eka was excited about Kevin & Diego’s vision to build a global consumer technology company in a category that doesn’t currently exist and that has the potential to reach 100s of millions of people. The problem of relationship health is global and there is not currently an accessible and affordable solution — Paired has set out to change that.
As we delved further into the detail, the power for Paired to have positive impact became ever more apparent. The stigma associated with relationship support is clear, with <1% of UK couples surveyed saying they would seek out offline help for their relationship vs. 30% who said they would consider using an app. Furthermore, the clinical evidence around relationship quality and its effect on both an individual’s own physical and mental health and when children are involved on their mental development has been well documented.
The impact Paired is already having was clear from an evaluation of the app by The Open University.It found that relationship quality improved 36% over 3 months of use with Paired and was 12% higher than this for 6–7 day a week users. What inspired us the most was the stories that couples shared with Paired and the clear positive impact the app had had on their lives.
We believe that Kevin & Diego have an unfair advantage having worked for a significant period of time in the behavioural change and mobile app space,most recently at Memrise where Kevin was Head of Product and Diego was an Engineering Manager. We are delighted to be joining the Founders on this journey alongside entrepreneurs from Memrise, Buusu, Peak, Wise (formerly TransferWise) and Farfetch.
