As it looks to continue along its path of developing clinically validated digital therapeutics for consumer and clinical mental health and wellness, Headspace has bulked up its executive team with the addition of longtime Intuit executive CeCe Morken.
Morken will become the company’s first president and chief operating officer, joining the Los Angeles-based, billion-dollar-valued mental wellness company after spending 13 years at Intuit.
She previously served as executive vice president and general manager of that company’s strategic partner group.
Morken has spent the past 35 years at technology companies and will be reporting directly to the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Rich Pierson.
Her operational experience will come in handy as Headspace continues to develop both commercial and clinical products to bring to market, Pierson said.
“We are thrilled to welcome to CeCe, a team-oriented and purpose-driven leader, to the Headspace team,” said Pierson in a statement. “We feel so lucky that the company is in a position to attract someone with the deep experience that CeCe has in scaling world-class organizations.”
While on the surface there may not appear to be much similarity between a massive, decades-old accounting software development behemoth and a 10-year-old startup that has made its name focused on mental wellness, Pierson said that as Headspace expands it would require the skills that Morken developed over decades in operational roles at her previous company.
Headspace is already a giant in the mental wellness category. It counts more than 65 million* users around the world, and its Headspace for Work service is being rolled out as a service for employees at companies like Adobe, General Electric, Hyatt and Starbucks. The company has research underway in over 20 disease states* to move from mental wellness into the digital health category, under its Headspace Health subsidiary, which launched in 2018.
*This story has been updated to include that the company currently has 65 million users and is involved in studies of over 20 disease states with one product moving to a clinical trial.
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