WellSet wants to be the wellness industry’s discovery platform

A Los Angeles-based startup wants to be the Airbnb of the insta-buzziest concept of the 2010s: wellness. 

WellSet calls itself a discovery platform for “wellness services” like massages and acupuncture. On WellSet, users can find practitioners through a platform search or through recommendations from friends, brands, and public figures. Once users settle on a nutritionist or hypnotherapist, for example, they can book appointments within the platform itself.

The company, led by CEO Tegan Bukowski, is announcing Tuesday that it’s raised pre-seed funding from a team of investors. In the coming weeks, it plans to launch in Los Angeles featuring about 1,000 local practitioners on the platform, with a national expansion planned for later this year.

“We’re excited to create a true tech platform for wellness,” Bukowski told Mashable. “Everyone should have access to knowing what kinds of things they should eat, or mindfulness practices, or personal routines they can be taught to integrate into their daily life.”

Wellness is a $4.2 trillion market that’s been growing steadily year over year. Investors have put $2.5 billion into wellness startups, according to industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang, and he thinks that’s just the beginning.

“This is a societal trend now, and the tech industry is coming around,” he said. “But we’re really at the cusp of this market.”

When searching for any sort of alternative healer or coach — whether because traditional medicine hasn’t worked out, or you’re looking to make some basic lifestyle changes, or something else — it can be difficult to connect with the right field, let alone person. Sussing out the credentialed from the quacks, or whether an Ayurvedic practice will really help you more than a holistic health coach, can be daunting.

Currently, there are other platforms that help people find and book services with wellness practitioners, such as MindBody and ClassPass, but not one mainstream service dedicated to wellness as a whole. 

That’s where WellSet wants to come in. It hopes to bridge the communication gap between wellness seekers and legitimate, credentialed providers. That is a refreshing contribution to the sometimes-fluffy wellness industry. However, WellSet’s stated reticence to provide more active guidance for users — especially when facilitating health treatments that may be scientifically murky — ignores some of the fundamental lessons the tech industry has learned about the dangers of the “we’re just a platform” approach.

WellSet will make money by charging practitioners a one-time 30 percent customer referral fee for each new customer who books through the platform, and a 3 percent transaction booking fee for repeat bookings. Investors are apparently into the idea; after raising startup money from the executives’ personal networks, the recent pre-seed round included funding from Kelly Noonan Gores and Broadway Angels, who have invested in companies like Goldie Blox and Zume in the past. Bukowski also has a veteran wellness company executive, CTO Sky Meltzer, along with a former Pinterest growth strategist, COO Hanna Madrigan, at her side to scale and grow.  

Based on the amount of cash and interest in the wellness space, WellSet could be poised to fill the need for a dedicated discovery platform. However, it will need to integrate the tech industry’s hard-won lessons about user, worker, and medical accountability if it is to become a trusted, ethical companion, and not just the latest tech company to ride the pop-wellness gravy train.

Wellness is a slippery term, though some academics are actively working to define and scientifically prove its usefulness. WELL for Life — a Stanford University program which promotes a “proactive approach” to physical and mental healthcare — defines wellbeing as “a holistic synthesis of a person’s biological, psychological, and spiritual experiences, resulting from interplay between individuals and their social, economic, and physical environments, that promote living a fulfilling life.”

Bukowski, WellSet’s CEO, doesn’t like the term “wellness” because of its “woo woo” connotations. Instead, she prefers “preventative healthcare,” which is a term and approach places like Stanford WELL also use to describe a more proactive, lifestyle-based approach to healthcare.  

To maintain the integrity of “wellness” and avoid lumping practices like astrology alongside something like physical therapy, WellSet has instituted some thoughtful safeguards to define wellness services as distinct from more scientifically tenuous iterations of “wellness.”

WellSet practitioners must be certified in their fields, and profiles feature reviews from their customers and students. WellSet has two tiers of practitioner verification, with the more stringent involving a manual check of credentials by the WellSet team. 

WellSet also only offers “modalities” (or practice areas) that are covered by insurance or flex spending dollars. Drawing the scientifically sound wellness line around the insurance industry’s views of alternative medicine practices, Bukowski likes to describe the services on WellSet as “medical adjacent.”

“Making sure a practitioner could be covered by a flexible spending account (FSA) or insurance is one of the ways we choose the people that can be on the platform,” Bukowski said. “It’s different to appear away from the fringe, and to keep modalities really based in real results.”

Still, whether in travel, exercise, or food delivery, more than a few platforms have displayed the economic and societal pitfalls that come with building a platform that facilitates services from non-mainstream providers. In contrast to much-scrutinized companies such as Airbnb, which made changes to more stringently vet and curate hosts and properties, WellSet toes a mid-2010s tech industry line. It stresses that it is a “discovery” platform, and that it’s up to users to “go on their own wellness journeys.”

“The important thing to know is that we aren’t a concierge,” Bukowski said. “We’re not telling anyone to go to a certain practitioner. This is a platform to connect practitioners with wellness seekers and potential clients. It’s a personal discovery process that we’re facilitating.”

That stance doesn’t sit well with Owyang. When connecting people with not entirely medically-vetted services, he thinks that the “we’re just a platform” approach is irresponsible.

“Platforms cannot stand back and say they’re transaction method only, they have to take responsibility for the transactions that happen there,” Owyang said. “Whether it’s helping to vet or educate or inform it, they will be changing people’s lives. And they will be held accountable if they’re successful. So you can’t stand back.”

Additionally, trends around natural medicine have been undermining some people’s faith and trust in the medical industry. Cynically, this is something a business like WellSet could be tapping into — but that is not Bukowski’s intention. Instead, the WellSet team hopes to promote wellness practices as a compliment to Western medicine.

“We really see part of what WellSet is doing as taking the idea of wellness and wellbeing and making it more mainstream,” Bukowski said. “Mental health and basic physical and preventative health should be a no-brainer for everyone.”

That holistic approach to healthcare may be obvious to some. But what “wellness” actually means is highly personal, and not necessarily addressable through yoga or even a life coach. Suggesting that the road to well-being is paved with bookable services commodifies a meaningful, larger idea about what it means to live well.

“Well-being is greatly affected by the physical and social environments that we find ourselves in,” Dr. Catherine Heaney of Stanford WELL for Life said. “I am highly skeptical of treating well-being as solely an individual issue, without thinking about the role of these environments.”

WellSet’s timing, consumer-friendly design, and tendency toward “preventative medicine” over spirituality-based practices have the potential to build a wellness services pipeline for a hungry consumer group and often hard-to-find practitioner base. However, if it is to go beyond just riding the wellness wave and truly promote well-being in a way that influences people’s health for the better, it will have to take responsibility for educating and being accountable to a wellness-seeking public. 

After all, every “journey” requires a guide.