Memos

Deal Memo: Burble Wellness

An AI-powered app delivering personalized hypnosis and subconscious therapy audio sessions, tailored to your needs for sleep, anxiety, and stress relief.

Drew Chapin

Drew Chapin

— 6 min read
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This memo is for informational purposes. This is not investment advice, nor is it an offer to sell securities of any kind. These are simply my personal opinions about the companies below. Conduct your own due diligence.

As of May 2025, I have no financial relationship with any company named here. If that changes, I will update this note.

If you have any questions about these memos, e-mail me.

The burble app (iOS App, Google App) delivers personalized hypnosis and subconscious therapy audio sessions, dynamically generated based on individual input and powered by a proprietary large language model.

While it presents as a wellness app, burble is (fundamentally) a proprietary wellness content generation engine.

“We Got Problems:” The Problems burble Addresses

  • An increasing number of people experience mental health issues that drive sleep issues, anxiety, stress, and broadly have a negative impact on quality of life.
  • There are many barriers to receiving traditional therapy: it’s expensive, there are insurance coverage issues, and it can take a long time to start receiving professional help.
  • Those who do receive traditional therapy find that it’s expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to find the doctor, approach, or modality that works for them.
  • Those who receive therapy from tech-based competitors report they do not feel like treatments address individual needs and circumstances. Many are solely focused on treating symptoms after they occur.

Burble’s Solution & Technology

Burble addresses macro (trend, access) issues by delivering through a mobile app, and offers a compelling alternative to digital wellness apps by offering deep personalization and working to create behavioral and neurological changes on the subconscious level, where they originate.

Burble’s mobile app offers tools that can create new and lasting neural pathway changes:

  1. Custom Guided Visualizations: burble creates personalized audio tracks to address sleep, anxiety, trauma release, weight management, and more.
  2. Sound Escapes: Immersive binaural beat meditation music for 10-40 minutes of deep relaxation, scientifically proven to synchronize brainwaves.
  3. Life Coaching and mindset mentoring from Alexandra AI: A life-coaching chat function that provides real-time guidance by offering thought-provoking questions.
  4. Daily Mindfulness Activities: Short mindful activities including morning inspiration, evening relaxation, challenges, insight cards, and quick tools for stress management.

Burble has a patent-pending session-generation technology that receives user input (about their desired treatment, how they relax, music desired and ending) and generates an audio experience tailored for each user. Burble’s backend is a proprietary LLM that runs on their own servers and trained by their expert hypnotherapist, not a wrapper of a public LLM.

Other highlights from my conversations with burble:

  • “Meditation apps offer relaxation, burble offers transformation.”
  • “Burble supports real-time content generation in any spoken language, allowing for seamless international expansion”
  • “Calm and Headspace rely on human production workflows that do not scale and are impossible to use to make for a personalized experience.”

Strong Founder-Market Fit

Alexandra Janelli, CEO and founder of Burble, is a nationally recognized hypnotherapist and life coach with over fifteen years of experience, having been voted one of New York City’s premier practitioners in her field. She holds an Advanced Training Graduate Diploma in Hypnotherapy and Handwriting Analysis from the Hypnosis Motivation Institute-the first nationally accredited hypnosis program-and is a Certified Life Coach through the ICF-accredited iPEC Coach Training Program. 

Alexandra’s approach blends psychology, mindfulness, and energy work, and she has guided a diverse clientele including Academy Award-nominated actors, executives, and creatives. 

Her experience is woven into every aspect of the Burble app’s offering.

Daniel Taylor, CTO, is a seasoned developer with four patents and an expertise spanning AI-driven SaaS, security tech, IoT, and immersive XR experiences, with past collaborations ranging from Pfizer and the New York Yankees to Nelson Mandela and Oprah Winfrey. Earlier in his career, he helped pioneer the world’s first online banks and built widely adopted banking technologies across North America and Europe.

Digital Wellness Market Opportunity

The Digital Wellness and Wellness App Market is Growing

The global wellness app sub-sector (of the greater digital wellness space) is estimated to be valued at $12.8 billion in 2025, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.9% to $33.8 billion in 2032. 

Mental health and wellness apps are the largest portion of that sub-sector, representing about 40% of the sub-sector (larger than fitness and exercise apps and nutrition and diet apps.) 

A driver of this market growth has been the aggressive spending by segment leaders like Calm and Headspace who are estimated to have spent more than $300 million on user education in the last five years. This groundwork enables opportunities for new entrants who offer a differentiated approach.

Most relevant to Burble: hypnosis apps represent a tiny percentage of this existing market, perhaps representing an opportunity to offer the market a new twist to the existing user experience.

  • This post-pandemic recovery, political polarization, and economic uncertainty have directly correlated with an increase in anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. More people need more therapy. [1] [2] [3] [4]
  • Consumers are increasingly taking control of their own health with proactive measures rather than reactive treatment.
  • Consumers are expecting tailored wellness solutions. 
  • People are experiencing meditation fatigue and looking for new ways to facilitate behavioral changes. 
  • There is a growing acceptance of alternative therapies, including hypnosis. [5] [6] [7]

Competitive Differentiation & Moat

The mental wellness app space features several established players, including Headspace, Calm, BetterHelp, Talkspace, and Moodfit. Each is estimated to have more than 1 million monthly active users.

No competitors offer a hypnosis or subconscious product, nor do they offer Burble’s AI-driven personalization.

Burble’s AI is strengthened by its founding team’s domain expertise: founder Alexandra Janelli is an acclaimed hypnotherapist who has been recognized as one of the best practitioners in New York City. She has 15+ years of real-world experience that offers Burble a strong and unique basis for its large language model. I believe the founding team provides a strong defensive moat that cannot be easily-replicated or reproduced by competition.

Burble’s Business Model & Revenue Strategy

Burble currently offers a multifaceted revenue approach, including: 

  • B2C Subscription Model at $14.99 per month or $69.99 per year. 
    • Early beta shows 5+% of downloads convert to paid subscriptions, strong performance relative to market average freemium upgrade rates.
  • B2B White Label Partnerships: company has explored opportunities including healthcare institution integrations, corporate wellness program integrations, and hotel in-room wellness amenity integrations for guest experience enhancements. They received positive signals and intend to continue.

Traction & Key Metrics

  • Registered users: 900+
  • User capacity given current tech stack: 50,000
  • Low operating costs: [redacted]
  • Survey results:
    • 75% reported app helped them change and feel better
    • 80% stated they would continue using Burble post-beta
    • 75% found the platform easy to use
    • 70% indicated a willingness to pay for the app

The Hustle Fund Deal Assessment Framework 

The Hustle Fund deploys a deal assessment framework that essentially asks these five questions:

  • Team: What is the founder’s earned secret? 15+ years of experience in hypnotherapy.
  • Product: Is this a vitamin, or a pain killer? It is, by its very nature, a vitamin and the kind of proactive mental health tool that the market needs right now.
  • Market: How big is this market, and why now? People are hurting, and are seeking help with their mental wellness challenges more than ever before. At the same time that there is this increased demand for mental health services, hypnosis and subconscious care has transitioned from fringe to frontline care, being found especially effective in certain circumstances, and AI technology has reached the sophistication necessary to deliver truly personalized health experiences at scale.
  • Execution: Are the customer acquisition channels unique? Not at this point, but their focus on building an LLM that could be deployed in many different ways means they've maintained (all-important) flexibility in this area. If door #1 doesn't work, they have many others to try.
  • Fundraisability: Is the founder a strong sales person? In my experience (watching Janelli pitch, having lunch with Janelli and Taylor), yes. They won the Philadelphia This Week in Startups pitch competition and do a terrific job articulating their value.

These factors have met to create a unique opportunity at this moment - and the burble team has an unfair advantage. There are few in the world who are better-equipped to translate professional hypnotherapy into an accessible digital format than Alexandra Janelli with her domain expertise, industry recognition, and a proven track record.

I met burble for the first time when I heard their (winning) pitch at TWiS Founder Fridays Philadelphia

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