Kooth · FY24 revenue
£93.7M
+59% YoY. Pennsylvania contract live the full year. California pilot ramping. The number is good. The interesting question is whether it is durable.
A specimen sheet of editorial callout treatments. Pick by register: cover-stat for the year's biggest claim; sparkline-in-text when the data is supporting; tinted-margin infobox when a definition needs to slow the reader down. Each treatment is sized to its job. Use the new accents — Galley, Plate, Foundry — per their defended roles in palette-extension.md.
Per-seat economics — the BetterHelp / Cerebral / Talkspace D2C model — bill the customer for each registered user. COGS is linear in users. Per-population economics — Kooth's model — bill the customer once per contracted population (an ICB, a state). COGS is linear in peak concurrent users, which grows far slower than enrolled population. Gross margin compounds with density.
The reason Kooth is interesting and not, say, the fifteen US start-ups currently pitching state Medicaid plans is that Kooth already has Pennsylvania. It already has California1. It already has a deployment playbook that has been signed off by the procurement legal teams of two of the largest state governments in the United States.
The next twelve states will not require Kooth to invent a category. They will require Kooth to copy-paste an existing contract.
BetterHelp's blended customer acquisition cost has climbed from $114 to $287 ↗ over three years, while Talkspace's blended CAC has fallen from $96 to $14 ↘ on the back of the employer-channel re-orientation. The two curves now sit 20× apart.
| Operator | FY24 revenue | Distribution | Gross margin | Op. result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BetterHelpUS · D2C | $1.1B | D2C paid | 62% | −$48M |
| CerebralUS · D2C | $214M | D2C paid | 54% | −$97M |
| TalkspaceUS · Employer + payer | $197M | B2B · employer | 53% | +$8M EBITDA |
| BrightsideUS · payer-led | $78M | Payer | 48% | −$26M |
| KoothUK + US · state contracts | £93.7M | State Medicaid | 41% | +£11M PBT |
The Talkspace turnaround in two numbers. Eight quarters. No pivot. No press release. A re-orientation of distribution that the public market is still pricing as a marketing change.
Plate Pink · Pro piece Kooth is the only publicly traded mental-health business I know of that prints software margins on a clinical product. The London market does not appear to have noticed. FY24 revenue: £93.7M. Gross margin: 41%.
Foundry Brick · Standard piece Talkspace burned five million dollars a month. Then it didn't. The transition wasn't a pivot — it was a sequence of unglamorous operational moves that the rest of the category still hasn't copied.
Kooth's FY24 revenue1 ran 59% ahead of the prior year. Gross margin held at 41%2, comfortably above the 36% median for AIM-listed software businesses3. The Pennsylvania contract4, signed at a $58M floor with a five-year extension structure, is the single largest piece of disclosed contract value in the dataset.
The unit they sell isn't a seat. It's a population.
Twelve treatments. Each defended. See palette-extension.md for the accent rules each one consumes, and mockups/A2-deep-dive-offpiste.html for the same accents applied to a single piece end-to-end.