The London-based platform, which already covers 1.5 million eligible lives across enterprise and healthcare, is using the Series A to accelerate its entry into the US market and deepen its clinical infrastructure with a new CEO who sold his last company to Adobe.
London-based digital health token platform JAAQ has raised $17 million in Series A funding. The investment comes from Meridian Health Ventures, Fuel Ventures, Bolt Angels and Guinness Ventures, and the capital is earmarked to expand enterprise partnerships, deepen clinical infrastructure and expand into the US. Dr. Pooja Sikka, a partner at Meridian Health Ventures, has joined the company’s board as part of the deal.
The company was founded in 2021 with a direct-to-consumer model built around video-based mental health content. Since then, it has focused on the enterprise and healthcare space, putting its content library, now more than 10,000 clinically reviewed videos, into the digital products of insurers, employers and healthcare organizations, rather than distributing it to individual users.
The logic is structural: instead of asking people to search for a mental health platform, JAAQ embeds its content into the apps and services they already use. It currently covers over 1.5 million eligible lives through active enterprise placements.
Alex Packham has joined as CEO to lead the company’s next phase. Packham is best known for ContentCal, a social media management SaaS platform he founded and sold to Adobe in December 2021, after which he led the integration of the product within Adobe for three years before leaving.
The platform’s commercial offering is twofold. Organizations can license content from the JAAQ library and integrate it into their product journey, or license a bespoke JAAQ experience.
The company is also building what it describes as a “clinical engagement layer” for AI-powered products designed to embed curated mental health content into user journeys without any digital product or team building the clinical management hardware themselves.
The proposition for businesses is that it solves two problems at once: a lack of mental health opportunities and low engagement with the well-being benefits that organizations invest in but employees rarely take advantage of.
The clinical management framework is at the heart of how JAAQ differentiates itself from common AI health tools. The content of the platform is not made on demand, but within a defined clinical and creative framework, and Johri’s designation is intended to convey that the product is built with clinical validity, not hardwired.
With a particular focus on UK healthcare technology with access to the US market, Meridian Health Ventures is a natural fit for the position: the firm runs the first NHS-linked venture fund and has a dedicated Innovation in Mental Health Fund.
US expansion is a strategic priority designed to unlock funding. The UK market has provided validation, with the company’s website citing case studies including a UK bank that saved £896,000 in improving employee productivity and wellbeing, and an insurer that avoided the equivalent of twelve full-time customer service roles through content provided by JAAQ.
Translating this model to the US employer and health insurer market, where mental health benefits are increasingly a priority at the board level, but engagement remains a persistent challenge, is the next test.
