In a landmark moment for the wellness-industrial complex, a San Francisco startup has secured a $3.2 billion valuation for an app that sends users a single daily push notification reading, simply, “Go outside and touch grass.” The company, Verdant, describes its product as “a disruptive, AI-powered, nature-adjacent mindfulness protocol delivered via push-based micro-interventions.” Everyone else describes it as a reminder to go for a walk.
“People don’t want mental health,” said Verdant founder and CEO, Rowan Hart (they/them), while sitting in a conference room decorated with rented plants and a framed print that said Hustle, But Gently. “They want the aesthetic of mental health. We’re not here to heal you. We’re here to send you extremely marketable nudges toward something that might, in a best-case scenario, briefly unclench your jaw.”
The app’s core functionality is simple. At a user-selected time, Verdant sends one notification:
- “Go outside and touch grass.”
If the user taps the notification, the app opens to a minimalist screen displaying a looping GIF of sunlight through leaves and a subtle prompt: “Have you touched grass yet?” The only available responses are “Yes” and “I’ve thought about it, which is basically the same.” Both responses trigger a celebratory confetti animation and a recommendation to upgrade to Verdant Premium.
Verdant Premium, priced at $39.99 per month, unlocks advanced features such as multiple daily notifications, seasonal grass affirmations, and what the company calls “Somatic Pushes”: short, haptic nudges that vibrate your phone aggressively until you either go outside or throw it across the room. For enterprise clients, there is Verdant for Work, which integrates with Slack and sends team-wide messages like, “Everyone log off and touch grass or, at minimum, a recycled wood standing desk.”
“Our research shows people don’t need therapy; they need a $200 aura lamp, a hydration tracking bottle, and three separate apps telling them to inhale,” said Hart. “We’re just consolidating that chaos into one elegant subscription.”
Investors have flocked to the startup, citing “a massive unmet need for lightly spiritualized common sense.” Lead investor Marissa Cho of Hedge & Sage Ventures praised Verdant’s business model. “The genius here is that they’ve taken something humans already know how to do—go outside—and wrapped it in enough jargon to justify a nine-figure Series C. That’s the kind of innovation we want to see as the planet burns.”
Cho added that Verdant’s total addressable market includes “all humans with unresolved childhood issues and a smartphone,” an estimate she placed at “conservatively, everyone.” In her view, Verdant is not just an app, but “a platform for commodifying the vague longing people feel when they see a tree on Instagram.”
The app’s onboarding flow begins with a 48-question “eco-attachment assessment” that asks users to rank how often they feel “spiritually aligned with moss” and whether they experience “FOMO when other people post hiking content.” At the end, Verdant assigns each user a proprietary Grass Archetype™ such as:
- The Overwatered Achiever – “Doing too much, photosynthesizing too little.”
- The Burnt-Out Bermuda – “You look fine from far away but are spiritually patchy.”
- The Artificial Turf – “High-functioning, low-rooted, entirely decorative.”
Users are then encouraged to share their archetype on social media, accompanied by a branded hashtag and a discount code for Verdant’s soon-to-launch line of chlorophyll-infused, grass-scented wellness sprays.
Despite the app’s minimal functionality, Verdant’s pitch deck features a 37-page appendix on “proprietary nature algorithms,” including eye-catching graphs that appear to show a perfect correlation between “Grass Proximity Score” and “Perceived Meaningfulness of Life.” When pressed about the data during a recent TechBloom conference, Hart clarified that the graphs were “inspired by real feelings” rather than “constrained by traditional notions of data integrity.”
Industry observers note that Verdant is part of a broader trend of outsourcing basic life instincts to venture-backed platforms. Previous hits in the category include:
- An app that tells you when to drink water, featuring gamified kidney function.
- A subscription service that mails you pre-portioned sunlight in jars, later revealed to be ordinary daylight photos printed on glossy cardstock.
- A mindfulness app that plays a single sound—someone exhaling like they just closed all their browser tabs—for $12.99 a month.
“Millennials and Gen Z have been so thoroughly detached from their own circadian rhythms that they now need gentle, branded commands to perform actions their grandparents did for free,” said cultural critic and part-time crystal influencer Luna Martell. “I say this with love, as someone who once paid $85 for a candle named ‘Boundaries.’”
Of course, not everyone is impressed. Grass itself has remained pointedly silent on the matter, though a coalition of botanists released a statement calling Verdant “a sleekly packaged admission that we, as a society, have lost the plot.” The American Psychiatric Association, for its part, emphasized that while going outside can be beneficial, “grass is not a substitute for medical care, although it is arguably more grounded than your ex who just launched a breathwork Patreon.”
In response to the criticism, Verdant announced its next product: Verdant Plus+ Earth Mode, a $14.99 add-on that layers ambient forest sounds over your existing Spotify subscription. When asked why customers couldn’t simply go outside without paying, Hart smiled gently, the way only someone with a wellness brand and a Delaware C-corp can.
“People don’t pay for solutions,” they said. “They pay for the feeling that they’re doing something. We offer that feeling with excellent typography.”
The company’s roadmap grows more ambitious with each funding round. Upcoming features include AI-powered “Grass Buddies” that send personalized encouragement like, “Hey queen, log off and go stare at a tree,” and a B2B initiative that allows corporations to sponsor entire fields of grass, which employees can then tag for “brand-aligned healing experiences.” Rumors of a potential acquisition by a major tech conglomerate sent Verdant’s valuation soaring after insiders claimed the buyer plans to integrate “Touch Grass” directly into operating systems as a default wellness setting.
The escalation reached surreal levels last week when Verdant filed a trademark application for the phrase “Go Outside™.” In a prepared statement, the company explained that “while humans have historically gone outside in an unmonetized fashion, we believe this behavior can be more efficiently scaled and tracked under a unified brand umbrella.” Legal scholars are divided on whether such a trademark will hold, but agree that if it does, humanity probably deserves it.
Meanwhile, early adopters remain enthusiastic. “Before Verdant, I hadn’t seen the sun in four fiscal quarters,” said beta user and remote worker Daniel, 29, speaking from a co-working space with no windows and six Himalayan salt lamps. “Now I go outside at least once a week. Sure, it’s mostly to film myself going outside so I can post it with the hashtag #GrassIsMyTherapist, but honestly, that’s still growth.”
Back at Verdant HQ, employees gathered around a mood-board wall featuring earthy color swatches and phrases like “micro-dose nature” and “reclaim your chlorophyll.” Asked if they worry that their entire business model depends on people being so alienated from their own bodies that they need venture-funded reminders to look at the sky, one product manager shrugged.
“By the time people realize they could have just opened a window,” she said, “we’ll have already pivoted to monetizing air.”
Until then, Verdant continues to grow, investors remain thrilled, and millions of users will receive their daily notification, pause for a moment of reflection, and then—naturally—screenshot it for Instagram instead of actually going outside.
