San Francisco-based Castlight Health, which offers consumers a personalized health shopping platform, has announced the strategic acquisition of Mountain View, California-based digital health benefits platform Jiff. Castlight will pay about $135 million in the form of 27 million Castlight shares and options issued to Jiff equity holders. The two companies are both relatively early entrants into the digital health employee wellness space; Castlight was founded in 2008 and Jiff in 2010.

Jiff and Castlight's offerings (not to mention existing customer bases) complement each other well. Castlight offers a suite of transparency tools that employers can offer their employees to save money on healthcare costs, while Jiff provides a platform for connecting employees to different vendors for health and wellness programs. The combined platform, the companies said in a press release "will seek to improve every aspect of an employee’s health experience: from staying healthy, to accessing care, to managing a condition."

“Jiff harnesses the power of digital health solutions and the related ecosystem, bringing it all together in a way that gets employees engaged. Combine that with Castlight’s robust data assets and personalized messaging capabilities, which already have helped transform how employees make health decisions, and I believe we will create the industry leader for enterprise health benefits management,” Derek Newell, chief executive officer of Jiff, said in a statement.

Newell will become president of the new company while John Doyle, Castlight’s president and chief operating officer, will take on the role of CEO. Current Castlight CEO Dr. Giovanni Colella will serve as executive chairman of the board of directors, focusing on deepening key partner and customer relationships.

“The transaction’s structure and blending of our leadership teams reflect our strongly held belief in the complementary aspects of the combination.  Indeed, we believe the combination of Castlight and Jiff will enable us to more quickly achieve our goals of platform expansion and accelerated growth on a larger revenue base,” Doyle said in a statement. “This deal is truly transformational, and it supports why we are so excited about our combined company’s potential. Employers are clamoring for consolidation of offerings and more comprehensive health benefits solutions, and our planned combination answers their call.  We believe the combination of Castlight and Jiff will create substantial value for our stockholders, and tremendous growth opportunities for our talented employees.”

At the time of its acquisition, Jiff had raised just shy of $68 million. According to Castlight, they expect to break even on the investment by the end of 2018, leveraging their size to address some operating inefficencies at Jiff.

“Despite all of the changes in healthcare that have happened and will come, one thing is constant: employers continue to provide healthcare benefits," Colella said in a statement. "Moreover, they care deeply that their employees engage in their benefits so that the returns on this huge investment are felt by all. This is a tremendous challenge, and we believe the combination of Castlight and Jiff is uniquely positioned to solve it.”