Consumer health & wellness · Meditation and sleep
Deep Meditate
A meditation, music and sleep app that grew past half a million downloads on word of mouth, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, and has left conflicting paper trails about where and when it actually started.
Life can be stressful, but meditation isn't
That line sits at the top of Deep Meditate's own website, and it doubles as the company's whole pitch. Open the app and three doors appear: Meditate, Music, Sleep. Pick one, press play, and a guided voice walks a user through a breathing exercise, a nature soundscape, or a bedtime story meant for adults rather than children.
“We believe that the modern mind is overstimulated. The purpose of Deep Meditate is to help restore an ancient balance through meditation and sleep,” the app's Google Play listing says. Ten guided meditation suites cover breathing, mindfulness, muscle relaxation, and workplace stress. A library of more than 250 music and nature tracks runs alongside sleep hypnosis sessions and weekly sleep stories.
A crowded room
Deep Meditate did not arrive first. By the time it reached Y Combinator's stage, Calm and Headspace had already trained a generation of phone owners on what a guided meditation app should feel like, and dozens of smaller entrants, from Insight Timer to Frequency Breathwork, were competing for the same anxious, sleepless audience. CB Insights lists Body & Brain, Othership, Peach Mindfulness, The Class and Frequency Breathwork as direct competitors.
The company's later product vendor, Unico Connect, described the challenge in a case study: building an app that could stand next to the category leaders on day one, in a space where users open the app at their most vulnerable moments and any friction breaks the experience. Deep Meditate's answer was to keep the product small and specific, three sections instead of a sprawling library, and to lean on personalization: content that adapts to a user's mood, listening history and time of day.
A Carleton student, then a Waterloo company
The earliest independent account of Deep Meditate's founding comes from BetaKit's coverage of Y Combinator's Winter 2020 Demo Day, which named “Advait Saravade, a student at Carleton University” as founder and put the startup's founding year at 2018. CB Insights, drawing on the same period, lists a Suite M002 address on Bank Street in Ottawa, Carleton's home city, as the company's headquarters.
Y Combinator's own current listing for the company tells a different, later story: founded in 2019, based in Waterloo, Canada, with Saravade shown under a “Former Founders” heading even as the company's YC page marks it “Active.” A 2024 profile cited by a third-party aggregator adds a third data point, a California founding year and headquarters claim, that the aggregator itself flags as conflicting with the older sources. No public record resolves which year or which city is the operative one; what is consistent across every source is the founder's name and the product's shape.
A 2024 feature from Newzchain, a content site, says Saravade built the app while dealing with his own stress and insomnia, a motivation the article states but does not attribute to a direct quote from him.
Growth before the batch, silence after
By the account collected in a 2026 third-party company profile, Deep Meditate had already reached 500,000 Android installs by December 2019, grown, the profile says, without paid acquisition, months before Y Combinator's March 2020 Demo Day put it in front of investors. The Google Play store listing, last updated August 16, 2024, still shows 500K+ downloads and 12.9K reviews, the same order of magnitude cited more than four years earlier, which suggests growth had already leveled off by the time of the YC batch or that the figure was never revised to reflect anything beyond it.
After the 2020 Demo Day, the public paper trail goes quiet. No further funding announcement, press coverage or product update appears until a June 2026 case study from Unico Connect, a software development vendor, describing a rebuild of the app on native Swift and Kotlin with a Node.js and Postgres backend and a personalization engine layered on top.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Y Combinator participation | Winter 2020 batch, status listed as Active, one founder shown under a "Former Founders" heading, team size 1. | YC data |
| Founding year and city | Y Combinator's current listing says 2019, Waterloo. BetaKit's March 2020 reporting and two data aggregators say 2018, Ottawa, tied to Carleton University where the founder was a student. | Conflicting |
| Corporate address | PitchBook and a related aggregator list a Walnut, California suite as the corporate office. Google Play's developer information for "Deep Meditate, Inc." lists a Claymont, Delaware address, a common registered-agent location for Delaware corporations, plus a US phone number. | Public record |
| Funding amount | CB Insights and PitchBook both record $150,000 total raised in a March 2020 accelerator deal with Y Combinator as the only named investor. A separate aggregator, FundedIQ, records the same round at $200,000. | Conflicting |
| SEC filings | A full text search of SEC EDGAR for "Deep Meditate" and for "Advait Saravade" returns zero results across every form type, as of September 25, 2026. | Public record |
| Federal grants, trials, FDA records | No NSF or NIH award, no registered clinical trial, and no FDA filing under the company's name appears in the research file compiled for this profile. NSF award records turned up by a name search are unrelated organizations. | Not found |
| Download and rating counts | Google Play lists 500K+ downloads and 12.9K reviews as of its August 16, 2024 update. Unico Connect's case study independently states the same 500K+ download figure alongside a 4.8 App Store rating. | Public record |
| Engagement and retention lift | A "60 percent lift in user engagement" and "three times stronger session retention" are reported by Unico Connect, the vendor that built the app's most recent version, and are not published by Deep Meditate itself or any independent analytics source. | Company-stated |
Read plainly: Deep Meditate is a real, shipped app with a genuine user base in the hundreds of thousands and a real Y Combinator credential. But nearly every number attached to it, the founding year, the city, the funding total, comes from a data aggregator rather than a primary filing, and the aggregators do not agree with each other or with the company's own current page.
What to watch
- Whether a Form D or any other SEC filing ever appears for Deep Meditate, Inc. or a related entity.
- Whether the company's own materials settle on one founding year and one home city.
- Named investors beyond Y Combinator, if further funding is raised.
- An updated download or rating count; the Google Play listing has not changed materially since 2019 installs first crossed 500,000.
In their words
“Life can be stressful, but meditation isn't.”
Deep Meditate, company website · Company
“Deep Meditate makes it simple to calm the nerves in moments of panic and nurtures the mind's ability to be resilient throughout life.”
Deep Meditate, company website · Company
“We believe that the modern mind is overstimulated. The purpose of Deep Meditate is to help restore an ancient balance through meditation and sleep.”
Deep Meditate, Google Play store listing · Company
“Quick turn around and the ability to work with custom requirements. The team took care of the design detailing end to end and were a pleasure to work with.”
Founder & CEO, Deep Meditate, quoted in a Unico Connect case study, 2026 · Company
“Hi Angelica, this is great feedback and we'll be sure to add filtering to the next version.”
Deep Meditate, Inc, developer reply on Google Play, 2020 · Company
“This app provides a lot of different kinds of meditation free, with many many more available on the paid version (which is most less expensive than others).”
Google Play user review, October 13, 2019 · User review
“The guided meditations are nice, and I'm glad I can put my phone to sleep using them.”
Google Play user review, December 31, 2019 · User review
Related companies
Sources
- YC dataDeep Meditate company page
- Independent11 Canadian companies in Y Combinator's Winter 2020 Demo Day
- Data aggregatorDeep Meditate company profile
- Data aggregatorDeep Meditate company profile
- Data aggregatorDeep Meditate funding profile
- Data aggregatorDeep Meditate company profile, noting conflicting founding and location claims
- PartnerDeep Meditate, Meditation App case study
- Public recordDeep Meditate: Relax & Sleep, store listing and reviews
- CompanyDeep Meditate website
- IndependentDeep Meditate, Your Pocket-Sized Sanctuary for Restful Sleep
- Public recordFull text search for "Deep Meditate" and "Advait Saravade"
- Public recordFDA, NIH, NSF, ClinicalTrials.gov and PubMed record search
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
