*By Chloe Aiello*
Meditation app Headspace is zen about its future.
Coming off a profitable year in 2018, with more than $100 million in revenue, CEO and co-founder Rich Pierson told Cheddar on Monday that the company is looking to continue its domination of the digital meditation space by pushing into health care and international markets.
"Last year, we were well north of $100 million in revenue," Pierson said. "We had a great year last year."
Founded in 2010, Headspace offers subscription-based meditation tools and guidance through a mobile app. Pierson attributed the company's success to a confluence of factors ー from good timing to "macro trends in the world" that have people feeling more stressed and anxious than usual.
That's good news for Headspace as it navigates an increasingly crowded meditation technology landscape and makes a push into health care to differentiate its app from the competition, which includes rival app Calm](https://www.wsj.com/articles/headspace-vs-calm-the-meditation-battle-thats-anything-but-zen-11544889606), and a multitude of others emerging in the space.
"We've really invested in health care. So we've got an FDA-approved product that will be coming out in 2020, so that we can really kind of build on that authenticity and trust and the ... science," Pierson told Cheddar on Monday.
The prescription-based product will address specific illnesses, although Pierson would not say which.
"It's going to be a separate product to our core consumer, for specific disease states. We haven't announced the disease state, but it will be for individual disease states, and then you'll be able to get them prescribed by your doctor once we get FDA approval," Pierson said.
Pierson said the company is aiming for 2020 launch of those products, and in the meantime is focusing on business-to-business partnerships, which numbers at 300 clients, and expanding into multiple international markets.
Pierson brushed off the notion that meditation is just another wellness fad.
"People say, 'is meditation a fad?' And I'm like, 'well it's been around for two and a half thousand years, so that's the longest fad in history,'" he said. "And I think the reason that its lasted that amount of time is because its works, I think people keep doing it because they're getting benefit from it."
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
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You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
Japanese automakers Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi are dropping their talks on business integration.
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