Why We Invested in Aura: An Emotion-Based Search Engine and the Future of Personalized Wellness

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Aura, a digital health and machine learning company improving people’s mental health using therapist-created content, personalized to people’s moods. Welcome Steve, Daniel, and the Aura team to Prototype Capital!

Coming in, we saw three fundamental truths about mental health and wellness:

1. American stress is on the rise. According to the American Psychological Association, citizens are reporting the most significant increase in stress in the report’s 10-year history. There are 40 million US adults aged 20–50 with “extreme stress.”

2. Services improving mental health should be personalized. Each and one of us is different and has different needs. The service and help we receive should be tailored to our personal needs.

3. As technology advances, AI and machine learning will increasingly be used to tackle mental health problems through virtual counseling, patient monitoring, and precision therapy. These technologies have demonstrated success in helping combat depression and anxiety.

We believe Aura offers the best solution to these truths, allowing individuals to receive a quick three minute burst of relief when they need it. In short, Aura takes emotion input filtered with digestion preference, followed by a rating of the completed content to then better improve the system of wellness content recommendation. The result is an ever-improving, highly personalized recommendation system with enormous library of content such as meditations, life coaching, stories, music, and much more.

Aura’s long-term vision is not to be a meditation company, but a wellness-focused software company whose goal is to find the truth about how to improve humans’ emotions and happiness and change people’s daily behavior.

The goal is not to teach you how to meditate per se; the goal is to provide instant emotional relief and to create trust that anyone can come to Aura whenever they’re feeling stressed, anxious, sad, or having trouble sleeping. In the long run, Aura aims to directly ask you how you’re feeling and then use Natural Language Processing to exactly tailor the content you need or even virtually connect you to a therapist to help.

Aura has a core group of people who love the product, and Aura is building something that matters. It’s not just a “nice to have” product; it’s more than just a “business”. Even if Aura can save one person’s life, it adds massive value to the world, and we’re excited to be part of the vision of becoming the “a personalized mental wellness app for everyone” to life.

Create the future,

Team Prototype Capital