Nanea Reeves, Founder & CEO of TRIPP

In this Q&A, you’ll hear from Nanea Reeves, founder & CEO of TRIPP, a mindfulness technology company. Nanea shares how personal grief and a desire to enhance wellness led to AI-driven, research-backed VR experiences.

Tell us about TRIPP.

Nanea Reeves: At TRIPP, our mission is to leverage AI and immersive technology to deliver personalized mindfulness experiences accessible to users around the world. Originally conceived as a virtual reality platform, we’ve since expanded our offerings across augmented reality and mobile devices.

Unlike many meditation apps, TRIPP is informed by research and combines immersive worldscapes with gamification, binaural audio, breathwork, and guided meditations to deliver holistic well-being experiences tailored to the needs of each user.

Upon entering our app, users are prompted to choose from our continuously expanding catalog of journeys — whether they’re looking to find focus or calm, prepare the mind for sleep, learn the latest mindfulness techniques, or escape with immersive sights and sounds from the natural world.

Bespoke to the user, our composer feature allows users to personalize their experience by selecting a variety of worldscapes and reflections that best suit their needs. To encourage a consistent mindfulness practice, we developed a rewards system called Sanctum, where users are given mixed-reality items for using TRIPP consistently.

Before and after each experience, users are prompted to self-report their mood. Following a single session, users see an average reported mood improvement of 25%.

What led you to pursue this opportunity?

NR: The journey that brought me to TRIPP is profoundly personal, fueling my unwavering dedication to our mission as founder and CEO. It began with losing my husband to cancer, a profound loss that prompted me to reevaluate my life’s purpose.

Having cultivated a meditation practice since my teenage years, I’ve always understood its power. Through mindfulness, my aim became clear: to make meditation accessible to people worldwide, blending my passion for video games with my expertise in software development.

In retrospect, hearing from our users about how TRIPP has empowered them during challenging periods, enabled them to be more engaged with their loved ones, and discover inner peace, tranquility, and happiness inspires me everyday.

It underscores the transformative power of mindfulness technology and using technology for good.

How did you turn your idea into a company?

NR: I went deep into a contemplative space on how to rebuild my life going forward on my own. I had spent a lot of my career supporting the ideas of other people, but I realized now was the time to be the CEO.

I knew that I had achieved a certain level of success in the video game industry, and I had the good fortune to be an early investor in Oculus, which gave me access to early iterations of the device in development.

I reached out to some former colleagues and we started noodling on some ideas. With many of the early Oculus experiences designed to generate fear, I started to wonder about the inverse: Could we generate positive feelings in a person?”

When I pitched a few early investors about my idea, there was a lot of interest, but Tim Chang at Mayfield Fund really leaned in with excitement, becoming the perfect early-stage investor for us. Since then we have raised over $26M in funding from some amazing investors including BITKRAFT, Qualcomm, Vine Ventures, Amazon Alexa Fund, HTC, Inflect Health, and others.

The early days of our company were rocky in trying to build a consensus with my co-founders on the direction we should go in. I’m very grateful to them for helping us get the product foundation in place, but eventually, I had to split from my co-founders to execute the vision I believed to be the North Star for TRIPP — building AI experiences that adapted over time and amassing a large consumer base to help us evolve our platform.

TRIPP launched in December 2019 on the Oculus [now Meta] Quest device, becoming the first meditation app on the platform — and we grew in popularity as a result. Most importantly, we gained immediate feedback from tens of thousands of users that we were helping them manage their stress during the pandemic.

I feel a profound sense of gratitude for the work of our team and the impact we have been able to have since then, but I know we are just beginning to scratch the surface, and that’s what excites me about the future.

How big can this get?

NR: As a result of our commitment to accessibility, TRIPP is available across a growing number of devices across mobile, including Apple Vision Pro, HTC VIVE Flow, Meta Quest platforms, Sony PlayStation VR, and XREAL’s augmented reality glasses. Through these diverse platforms, we’re able to deliver personalized wellness experiences for consumer and enterprise users on-demand wherever they are, at home or on the go.

Altogether, that addressable market is massive.

The launch of Apple Vision Pro and future headset launches toward the end of the year are expected to boost headset sales by 44.2% this year, according to IDC. By 2028, as more enterprises adopt immersive technology for their businesses, 24.7M headsets are expected to be sold.

Additionally, the meditation app market is expected to reach $2.6B by the same year, a testament to the demand for accessible, mindfulness solutions worldwide post pandemic.

How do we capture these markets? We continue to innovate. After reaching nearly 11M wellness sessions to date, we can harness recorded mood data to inform our machine-learning models, allowing us to incorporate hyper-personalization across our platforms.

We firmly believe that AI is pivotal in achieving unparalleled experience, and we are committed to integrating it across all our platforms while expanding offerings onto new devices.

How do you reach your core customer?

NR: Every person looking to improve their mental and emotional well-being—no matter the age, gender, race, ethnicity, sex, or experience level with meditation—can use TRIPP.

As a result of our efforts, we’re proud of our diverse user base which is 59% male, 39% female and 2% non-binary, demonstrating a broad demographic appeal worldwide.

While our core customers are consumers, we are expanding into corporate wellness, offering solutions that spark greater creativity, empathy, innovation, positivity, and calm across work environments both physical and remote.

On the clinical side, we actively participate in clinical trials exploring the use of virtual reality in supporting mental health outcomes. This includes a NASA-funded study looking at TRIPP’s impact on reducing stress response in astronauts. We are also working with treatment facilities for substance use disorder and helping support those undergoing cancer treatment, among other clinical studies.

What’s next on the roadmap?

NR: There’s a massive technological revolution underway in computing, moving from the hand to the head, and we’re driving this adoption in the health and wellness industry.

Back in February, we were among the first to launch on the Apple Vision Pro, leveraging its advanced spatial computing capabilities to unlock our most visually captivating offering yet. These enhancements will allow us to develop a whole new version of the app, with plans to roll out across our platforms this year. Additionally, we continue expanding our catalog of worldscapes and reflections in our Apple Vision Pro offering, which is currently free for a limited time.

We also recently expanded our mobile offering with the addition of Kōkua, our AI-powered mindfulness guide. This feature represents a leap in on-demand personalization, capable of generating individualized reflections based on user feedback in real-time. With each meditation, Kōkua’s AI continues to evolve to better support users. We will be looking to add some new features to Kōkua over the coming months.

Looking ahead, with our commitment to continuous evolution and adaptation, we aim to not just keep pace with technological advancements but pioneer them to shape the future of wellness through technology.

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