Rocapine, a Paris venture studio building wellness apps, has raised a $13m Series A led by Educapital, the company said. The pitch is a neat inversion: take the playbook that made mobile gaming addictive, fast iteration, AI-native development, performance marketing, and aim it at the opposite outcome. Not time on screen, but, in the studio’s phrase, time well spent.
The premise starts with a number. The average person, the company says, citing DataReportal, spends around five hours and 16 minutes a day on a smartphone engineered to hook them, the better part of 15 years over a lifetime. Rocapine’s apps are meant to “hold instead of hook,” earning a place in a daily routine by being useful rather than by engineering compulsion.
The studio was founded in late 2024 by Stanislas Marchand, previously at the mobile-gaming unicorn Voodoo, with Jean-Gabriel Boinot-Tramoni and Sammy Teillet. Its model is a high-velocity publisher: test hundreds of concepts a year, often with independent developers, then craft and scale the few that resonate.
The company says it reached $6m in annual recurring revenue within nine months of launch, on more than 2.5 million downloads, with 70% of revenue from the United States. One app, it says, hit $1m ARR 16 days after launch.
The portfolio so far spans women’s health, habit-building, and breaking compulsive behaviour, with apps including Harmony, That Girl, and Unchaind. The new money will go on turning early hits into category leaders, scaling the testing engine to 400 apps this year, and building out the AI, data, and marketing infrastructure underneath.
“Technology was supposed to make us smarter, healthier and more connected,” said Stanislas Marchand, co-founder and chief executive. “Instead, too much of it has become addictive, extractive and exhausting.” He pointed to the cultural moment around the problem, noting that Oxford named “brain rot” its 2024 Word of the Year.
The market backdrop is doing the studio a favour. In-app purchase revenue from non-gaming apps overtook games for the first time in 2025, reaching about $85.6bn, according to Sensor Tower, with wellness among the faster-growing segments and demand skewing young. Rocapine says it aims to improve the lives of at least 40 million people over the next five years.
The round drew a notable cast of operators. It was led by Educapital with participation from Daphni, which led the 2024 seed, Ring Capital, and Centre Court Capital, alongside Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve of Alan and founders from consumer apps including Opal and Yubo.
“The best consumer products earn trust by improving people’s lives,” said Samuelian-Werve, an early backer, who credited the studio with using AI to personalise its apps and scale them quickly. Educapital, which led the round, is a Paris impact fund focused on edtech and the future of work, with around $200m under management and a portfolio that includes Preply and 360Learning. Its investment director, Alexandre Glaser, called Rocapine “one of the most compelling stories we have seen in European consumer tech.”
The studio operates across Paris, Nantes, and Barcelona, and its broader backer list runs deep in French consumer and gaming circles, taking in founders from Mojo, Photoroom, Knowunity, and The Sandbox, among others. The harder test, which the funding does not settle, is whether apps built to reduce screen time can grow on metrics that usually reward the opposite.
