Hintsa Performance, a Finnish employee wellness tech company that formed last year when H2 Wellbeing (makers of the HeiaHeia app) merged with Hintsa Performance in 2016, has raised $7.6 million (€6.8 million) in new funding. Life insurance company OP Insurance led the round along with Pontos Group. Previous investor Ilmarinen also participated in the round.

Jussi Räisänen, CEO and cofounder of Hintsa Performance, told MobiHealthNews that the merger brought together H2’s technology with Hintsa’s wellbeing platform, which was developed to improve the health of Formula 1 drivers.

“A few years ago we merged the two companies because they wanted to scale their methods and we also wanted to bring some more scientific quality to our platform,” he said. “Since then we’ve been building and deploying a solution that builds on their methodology that’s already been their signature method of improving human performance in a sustainable manner. So we used our digital platform, the HeiaHeia part of the story, to make it scalable.”

The technology itself takes different forms depending on the different needs of various clients and end-user employees. The company offers its product to employers, insurers, and some specialist providers like physical therapists.

“It can be training programs, it can be coaching, it can be a more casual experience, depending on what organization this person is a member of and what kind of services are to be provided, so [it depends] on the partner we’re working with,” Räisänen said. “… Some people are more competitive, some are more athletic, so maybe it’s more toward a sport. But a lot of the people we’re looking to engage are the people who are not so involved in a particular sport, but are looking to get active from a relatively sedentary lifestyle. Or perhaps they’re looking to address a particular aspect of their life, like sleep, or recovery, or balancing their work and life better and so forth.”

Insurers in particular are a major growth area for the company, which makes OP Insurance a key investor.

“Here in Europe, as I’ve talked to different insurance companies, I think what we’re seeing is many of them are now making their first experiments in this domain,” Räisänen said. “I think the US insurers and some European insurers have invested quite a bit already and have invested properly in terms of actually getting results, but there’s a lot more that will happen with the rest of the insurance companies and players in that space as they start to invest in increasing pilots, figure out what they really want to do, and then start [deploying programs]. So we want to be ready for that and be able to deploy something that scales quickly, and I think we have that in place now.”

Räisänen said the company will use the funding for hiring, primarily in R&D. Among other things, Hintsa Performance is exploring how to use machine learning to leverage the experiences of their clients and further improve the platform.