Health
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Fitness startup Aarmy reinvents itself for a remote fitness world
Like a lot of startups, Aarmy faced some big challenges when the pandemic forced widespread shutdowns in March.
Up until then, Aarmy was offering in-person fitness classes from its locations in New York and Los Angeles. Trey Laird, who founded the startup with trainers Akin Akman (chief fitness officer) and Angela Manuel-Davis (chief motivation officer), told me that within 48 hours, the strategy shifted online, starting with fitness classes via Instagram Live — something it continues to offer, while also launching a digital subscription program over the summer.
The startup is backed by celebrity investors including Jay-Z, Chris Paul and Karlie Kloss, as well as firms like Mousse Partners, Valia Ventures, Pendulum and Wilshire Lane Partners. Laird said that the team always planned to launch an online business, with a few physical locations serving as “content engines.” The pandemic just accelerated those plans.
“What changed is, we thought we had time to perfect everything,” Akman said. “[Once the pandemic hit,] we didn’t have time to have all these in-depth conversations, we didn’t have time to wait. We wanted to get out there.”
An Aarmy subscription costs $35 a month, or $350 a year, offering access to a full digital library, including live sessions with Aarmy trainers, with 20 new practice sessions uploaded every week. The company says it already has “thousands” of paying subscribers, with a conversion rate of more than 70% from its free trial, and an 88% retention rate overall.
Manuel-Davis acknowledged that Aarmy’s coaches have had to rethink their approach, particularly since they can’t shoot themselves “in a room with 60 people” as originally planned. Now they have to provide all of the energy themselves, and they need to be “super intentional” about planning their sessions, rather than simply responding to the activity of the athletes in the room.
Beyond the classes, Aarmy has also launched an apparel business, selling a variety of fitness gear on its own website and via Net-a-Porter. In fact, the company says this side of the business has already brought in $450,000 in sales.
Akin described the overall Aarmy strategy as one that’s as much about mental conditioning as it is about physical fitness — which he argued has been well-suited to the pandemic era, when so many people are struggling with feelings of depression, isolation and the sense that they’re “victims of circumstance.”
Laird added, “For a brand where the inspiration and the mental strength and finding that inspiration is as important as the actual movement or actual workout, it’s been the perfect time. It’s presented a great opportunity to connect with people around the world and show what differentiates us.”
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Quell raises $3M to turn home fitness into a game
Do people want their at-home fitness to come in video-game form? The incredible popularity of games like Ring Fit Adventure suggests yes.
London-based startup Quell thinks it’s just the beginning for this genre, and they’ve raised a $3 million seed round to help prove it.
At the core of Quell’s gameplay is the “Gauntlet” — a harness, of sorts, that the player slips on to control Quell’s games. As players punch and dodge their way through the world, Gauntlet’s built-in sensors measure things like punch speed and accuracy, while customizable resistance bands keep things challenging.
We initially wrote about Quell back in August, and named it as one of our top startups from the Y Combinator S20 Demo Day.
Investors in this round include Twitch co-founders Kevin Lin and Emmett Shear, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, WikiHow founder Josh Hannah, TenCent, Khosla Ventures, Heartcore, Social Impact Capital and JamJar Investments. Quell co-founder Doug Stidolph tells me they were initially raising at a valuation of $10 million; by the time they’d closed the final investors in this round, the valuation had increased to $15 million. The company also recently closed a Kickstarter campaign, where it raised £501,341 (around $670,000 USD) from nearly 3,000 backers. With the ongoing pandemic making it scarier and riskier to hit the gym (if your state/county even allows it), interest and demand for home fitness options will just keep going up.
Image Credits: Quell
Quell’s hardware and games are initially being built to work with PC, Mac and mobile devices. That means no console support at first — a bummer, as a big ol’ TV seems like the ideal display for games like this, and consoles are probably the most user-friendly way of getting it there. It’s something the company says it has on its roadmap to hopefully tackle in the future, but the added cost/complexity of the console hardware approval process was a bit too much to take on at launch.
Meanwhile, Quell is building out its own in-house game studio, hiring folks like Peter Cornelius (formerly lead producer at the developer-centric gaming tech company Improbable) as Game Production director. One of the main goals, Quell co-founder Cameron Brookhouse tells me, is to build games that get the player exercising while still being deeply immersive; they want the gameplay to encourage movement intuitively, rather than tossing up prompts that say something like, “OK! Time for jumping jacks!”
The Quell team tells me they expect their first hardware to ship by the end of 2021. They’re currently working on transitioning their prototypes into production, figuring out how to do things like make it easier to adjust resistance or swap the Gauntlet from user to user, and to increase the number of different exercises its sensors can detect and gamify.
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Everlywell raises $175 million to expand virtual care options and scale its at-home health testing
Digital health startup Everlywell has raised a $175 million Series D funding round, following relatively fast on the heels of a $25 million Series C round it closed in February of this year. The Series D included a host of new investors, including BlackRock, The Chernin Group (TCG), Foresite Capital, Greenspring Associates, Morningside Ventures and Portfolio, along with existing investors including Highland Capital Partners, which led the Series C round. The startup has now raised more than $250 million to date.
Everlywell, which launched to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 as a participant in Startup Battlefield, specializes in home healthcare, and specifically on home healthcare tests supported by their digital platform for providing customers with their results and helping them understand the diagnostics, and how to seek the right follow-on care and expert medical advice.
Earlier this year, Everlywell launched an at-home COVID-19 test collection kit — the first of this type of test to receive an emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its use that allowed cooperation with multiple lab service providers over time. The COVID-19 test kit joins its many other offerings, which include tests for thyroid hormone levels, food and allergen sensitivity, women’s health and fertility, vitamin D deficiency and more. I spoke to Everlywell CEO and founder Julia Cheek about the raise, and she acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic was definitely behind the decision to raise such a large amount so quickly again after the close of the Series C, since the company saw a sharp increase in demand coming out of the coronavirus crisis — not only for its COVID-19 test kit, but for at-home digital healthcare options in general.
“We obviously have a very successful COVID-19 test,” she said. “But we’ve also seen three-fourths of our test menu just explode at well over 100% year-over-year growth, and several of our tests are at 4x or 5x growth. That is really representative of this shift in consumer health behavior that will continue in a big way in many different verticals that include testing, and making things more convenient, digitally-enabled, and in the home.”
Like other companies built on solving for a shift to more remote and virtual care options, Cheek said that Everlywell had already anticipated this kind of consumer demand — but COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the pace of change, which is why the startup put together this round, at this size, this quickly (she says they started the process of putting together the Series D in September).
“We’ve been talking about the digital health movement, and the consumer-directed movement probably for a decade now,” she told me. “I do believe that this will be the watershed moment, unfortunately. But hopefully, we will come out on the other side of the pandemic and say, ‘There are some good things that happened broadly for healthcare.’ That is the hope of what we lean into everyday, and fundamentally, why we went out and raised this amount of capital in this tremendous growth year.”
Image Credits: Everlywell
Everlywell has also expanded availability of its products this year, with distribution in more than 10,000 retail locations across Target, Walgreens, CVS and Kroger stores across the U.S. The company also landed a number of new partnerships on the diagnostic lab and insurance payer side, as well as with major employers — a key customer group as employers shoulder the largest share of healthcare spending in the U.S. due to employee benefit plans. Cheek says that despite their commercial and enterprise customer wins, the focus remains squarely on consumer satisfaction, which is what distinguishes their offering.
“Our COVID-19 test is 75% new people buying our product, and it has an NPS [net promoter score] of 75,” she said. “And then it’s the most highly referred product, and also one of our top tests where people buy other tests. Experience matters here — we know that if someone is a promoter of Everlywell, if they rate us a nine or a 10, on NPS, they are five times more likely to purchase again on the platform.”
That’s not new for Everlywell, according to Cheek — customers have always had a high degree of satisfaction with the company’s products. But what is new is the expanded reach, and the realization among many Americans that virtual care and at-home options are available, and are effective.
“What you have is this lightbulb moment for Americans in a new way that care can be delivered where then they definitely don’t want to go back,” she said. “It’s not just for Everlywell. This is all of these verticals, that have really shifted consumer behavior around healthcare in the home, and I think that will be somewhat permanent. That is the main driver here, and is what we’re seeing, and it’s why Everlywell has resonated so well with so many Americans.”
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Neuroglee gets $2.3 million to develop digital therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases
There are now about 50 million people with dementia globally, a number the World Health Organization expects to triple by 2050. Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of dementia and caregivers are often overwhelmed, without enough support.
Neuroglee, a Singapore-based health tech startup, wants to help with a digital therapeutic platform created to treat patients in the early stages of the disease. Founded this year to focus on neurodegenerative diseases, Neuroglee announced today it has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Eisai Co., one of Japan’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the founder and chief executive officer of predictive healthcare startup Biofourmis.
Neuroglee’s prescription digital therapy software for Alzheimer’s, called NG-001, is its main product. The company plans to start clinical trials next year. NG-001 is meant to complement medication and other treatments, and once it is prescribed by a clinician, patients can access its cognitive exercises and tasks through a tablet.
The software tracks patients’ progress, such as the speed of their fingers and the time it takes to complete an exercise, and delivers personalized treatment programs. It also has features to address the mental health of patients, including one that shows images that can bring up positive memories, which in turn can help alleviate depression and anxiety when used in tandem with other cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.
For caregivers and clinicians, NG-001 helps them track patient progress and their compliance with other treatments, like medications. This means that healthcare providers can work closely with patients even remotely, which is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Neuroglee founder and CEO Aniket Singh Rajput told TechCrunch that its first target markets for NG-001 are the United States and Singapore, followed by Japan. NG-001 needs to gain regulatory approval in each country, and it will start by seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance.
Once it launches, clinicians will have two ways to prescribe NG-001, through their healthcare provider platform or an electronic prescription tool. A platform called Neuroglee Connect will give clinicians, caregivers and patients access to support and features for reimbursement and coverage.
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Wellory raises $4.5M for its ‘anti-diet’ nutrition app
Wellory, a startup that bills itself as taking an “anti-diet approach” to nutrition and wellness, is announcing that it has raised $4.2 million in funding.
The round was led by Story Ventures, with participation from Harlem Capital, Tinder co-founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Ground Up Ventures, NBA player Wayne Ellington, Hannah Bronfman and others.
Wellory founder and CEO Emily Hochman (who was previously the head of customer success at WayUp) told me that she struggled with dieting in college, to the point where she was risking chronic illness and infertility. As a result, she became determined to gain a better understanding of nutrition and her own health, eventually studying and becoming a certified health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition.
Hochman said that through Wellory, she wants to offer that same understanding to others, which she said has created a “managed marketplace” matching users with a licensed nutritionist, registered dietitian or certified health coach. Those coaches create a personalized plan for losing weight or achieving other health goals, then continue to provide feedback as users share photos of each meal and additional health data.
For example, she said that a customer who had just given birth and was interested in postpartum weight loss would get matched with a coach who specializes in that area.
“The thing that is so important is that we build personalized plans,” she added. “We don’t have anything that says, ‘At Wellory, we do these 10 things and that’s a standard diet.’ We’re actually going to help you learn how to make smart and healthy decisions.”
Wellory CEO Emily Hochman (Image Credit: Wellory)
Wellory officially launched in September, but Hochman said some beta testers have been using the service for nine, 10 or 11 months. She said early customers include people who are interested in weight loss, those who need nutrition advice due to chronic illness and “optimizers” who simply want to make sure they’re eating as healthily as possible.
She also noted that although customers usually sign up with a specific goal in mind, “once they hit their goal, because of the power of a strong relationship, they say, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I was, let’s keep building, let’s make sure I can sustain this.’ ”
The app is available on iOS and Android and currently costs $59.99 per month. Hochman plans to introduce additional pricing tiers. and she said the funding will allow Wellory to expand the technology and marketing teams, and to explore new partnerships.
“As a data technology investor, we get approached by different types of wearable or diagnostic companies nearly every week,” said Jake Yormak of Story Ventures in a statement. “We love the category but what we saw in Wellory was a way to put a human coach at the center of understanding this health data. With nutrition as the wedge, Wellory has built a trusted relationship with people who affirmatively want to better understand and improve their wellbeing.”
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Singapore-based mental health app Intellect reaches one million users, closes seed funding
Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect
Intellect, a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020.
The company recently closed an undisclosed seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners . Angel investors including e-commerce platform Carousell co-founder and chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui; former Sequoia partner Tim Lee; and startup consultancy xto10x’s Southeast Asia CEO J.J. Chai also participated.
In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners principal Samir Chaibi said, “In Intellect, we see a fast-scaling platform addressing a pain that has become very obvious amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that pairing clinically-backed protocols with an efficient mobile-first delivery is the key to break down the barriers to access for millions of patients globally.”
Co-founder and chief executive officer Theodoric Chew launched Intellect earlier this year because while there is a growing pool of mental wellness apps in the United States and Europe that have attracted more funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, the space is still very young in Asia. Intellect’s goal is to encourage more people to incorporate mental health care into their daily routines by lowering barriers like high costs and social stigma.
Intellect offers two products. One is a consumer app with self-guided programs based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that center on issues like anxiety, self-esteem or relationship issues.
The other is a mental health platform for employers to offer as a benefit and includes a recently launched telehealth service called Behavioural Health Coaching that connects users with mental health professionals. The service, which includes one-on-one video sessions and unlimited text messaging, is now a core part of Intellect’s services, Chew told TechCrunch.
Intellect’s enterprise product now reaches 10,000 employees, and its clients include tech companies, regional operations for multinational corporations and hospitals. Most are located in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and India, and range in size from 100 to more than 3,000 employees.
For many small to mid-sized employers, Intellect is often the first mental health benefit they have offered. Larger clients may already have EAP (employee assistance programs), but Chew said those are often underutilized, with an average adoption rate of 1% to 2%. On the other hand, he said Intellect’s employee benefit program sees an average adoption rate of 30% in the first month after it is rolled out at a company.
Chew added that the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted more companies to address burnout and other mental health issues.
“In terms of larger trends, we’ve seen a huge spike in companies across the region having mental health and wellbeing of their employees being prioritized on their agenda,” said Chew. “In terms of user trends, we see a significantly higher utilization in work stress and burnout, anxiety and relationship-related programs.”
Intellect’s seed round will be used to expand in Asian markets and to help fund clinical research studies it is currently conducting with universities and organizations in Singapore, Australia and the United Kingdom.
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Mental health startups are raising spirits and venture capital
A spate of startups focused on mental health recently made enough noise as a group that they caught the eye of the Equity podcast crew. Sadly, the segment we’d planned to discuss this topic was swept away by a blizzard of IPO filings that piled up like fresh snow.
But in preparation, I reached out to CB Insights for new data on the mental health startup space that they were kind enough to supply. So this morning we’re going to dig into it.
Regular readers of The Exchange will recall that we last dug into overall wellness venture capital investment in August, noting that it was mental health startups inside the vertical that were seeing the most impressive results.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
I wanted to know what had happened even more recently.
After all, Spring Health recently raised $76 million for its service that helps companies offer their workers mental health benefits, Mantra Health disclosed that it has raised $3.2 million to help with college-age mental health issues and Joon Care announced $3.5 million in new capital to “grow its remote therapy service for teens and young adults,” per GeekWire.
Sticking to theme, Headway just raised $32 million to build a platform that “helps people search for and engage therapists who accept insurance for payments,” according to our own reporting, and online therapy provider Talkspace is pursuing a sale — it looks like an active time in the mental health startup realm.
So, let’s shovel into the latest data and see if the signals that we are seeing really do reflect more total investment into mental health startups, or if we’re overindexing off a few news items.
The state of mental health venture investing
To prepare the ground, let’s talk about the general state of healthcare investing in the venture capital world. Per CB Insights’ Q3 healthcare VC report, venture capital deal volume and venture capital dollar volume reached new record highs in the sector during Q3 2020.
The quarter’s 1,539 rounds and $21.8 billion in invested capital were each comfortably ahead of prior records set in Q2 2018 for round volume (1,431) and Q2 2020 for dollar volume ($18.4 billion) for healthcare startups.
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3 growth tactics that helped us surpass Noom and Weight Watchers
Many consumers might think Noom or Weight Watchers are industry leaders with their nonstop commercials, but neither is the fastest-growing weight management program.
Over the past year, nutrition app Lifesum has acquired users at nearly twice the rate of both Noom and Weight Watchers, according to statistics from Sensor Tower, the independent market intelligence for the mobile app economy.
Over this past summer, we surpassed Noom on the global scale with 45 million users. More impressively, we accomplished this without any TV buys. That’s right — no multimillion dollar ad campaigns, allowing us to redistribute precious marketing dollars to other growth projects.
Here’s a closer look at the three growth marketing tactics I credit with helping us scale Lifesum over the last 36 months. It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget.
Understand the different generational lenses
Generations approach products differently. It’s important for startups to understand the different generational approaches of their customers. Startups that spend time thinking and strategizing about where generational trends are going will scale faster.
Here’s a closer look at the three growth marketing tactics I credit with helping us scale Lifesum over the last 36 months. It’s a strategy any startup can use, regardless of size or budget.
Millennials and Generation Z are now the largest consumer market in the world, so you can’t ignore them if you want to scale. With Lifesum these generations have helped our brand surpass the older and well-established competitors. We achieved this by intimately understanding how they view health and fitness.
Gen Z and millennials are all about empowerment. They grew up with Google and Facebook, having information at their fingertips. They are far less likely to be moved by a TV commercial since they desire to discover the world on their own.
In our industry, we’ve learned millennials and Gen Z don’t want a one-size-fits-all weight loss program or to count calories like their parents did 20 years ago. As millennials and Gen Z started embracing keto, intermittent fasting and pescatarian diets, our nutrition team had already created tailored programs to help them stick with it.
Bypass traditional marketing methods
As a brand, it’s important to look ahead and anticipate what is coming next. This also applies to marketing your product. If you get in early with emerging marketing platforms, you will save money and potentially reach more early adopters.
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Strava raises $110 million, touts growth rate of 2 million new users per month in 2020
Activity and fitness tracking platform Strava has raised $110 million in new funding, in a Series F round led by TCV and Sequoia, and including participation by Dragoneer group, Madrone Capital Partners, Jackson Square Ventures and Go4it Capital. The funding will be used to propel the development of new features, and expand the company’s reach to cover even more users.
Already in 2020, Strava has seen significant growth. The company claims that it has added more than 2 million new “athletes” (how Strava refers to its users) per month in 2020. The company positions its activity tracking as focused on the community and networking aspects of the app and service, with features like virtual competitions and community goal-setting as representative of that approach.
Strava has 70 million members, according to the company, with presence in 195 countries globally. The company debuted a new Strava Metro service earlier this year, leveraging the data it collects from its users in an aggregated and anonymized way to provide city planners and transportation managers with valuable data about how people get around their cities and communities — all free for these governments and public agencies to use, once they’re approved for access by Strava.
The company’s uptick in new user adds in 2020 is likely due at least in part to COVID-19, which saw a general increase in the number of people pursuing outdoor activities, including cycling and running, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic when more aggressive lockdown measures were being put in place. As we see a likely return of many of those more aggressive measures due to surges in positive cases globally, gym closures could provoke even more interest in outdoor activity — though winter’s effect on that appetite among users in colder climates will be interesting to watch.
Strava’s app is available free on iOS and Android, with in-app purchases available for premium subscription features.
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Spora Health launches primary care network for Black people and people of color
A number of healthcare disparities exist for Black people in America, but they can oftentimes go unaddressed due to the lack of education and understanding among medical professionals. Spora Health, which launches today for patients in Virginia, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Florida, aims to fix that.
“An equitable healthcare system has never existed in America, especially for Black folks and that is the goal,” Spora Health founder and CEO Dan Miller told TechCrunch.
Spora Health is a primary care provider for Black people and people of color. Initially, Spora Health is taking a telemedicine approach, but eventually plans to open physical locations.
Spora Health patients get access to its care delivery platform and care team that consists of doctors, nurse practitioners, nutritionists and more. Its machine learning-driven technology also can predict risk profiles for patients and look for chronic conditions like pre-diabetes, hypertension, emphysema and more.
Image Credits: Spora Health
Spora Health costs $9.99 per month. On the first visit, patients pay their normal co-pay. For those without insurance, they pay a one-time $99 fee on their first visit. You can think of it almost as a One Medical, which charges $199 per year, but with the specific needs of Black people and people of color in mind.
“Being a young startup, we can compete on price,” Miller said. “For us, we can make the offering more affordable because we have less overhead as well as tech that allows us to be more thoughtful.”
While the goal is to better serve Black people and people of color, not all of Spora Health’s providers fall into those demographics.
“We want to overindex on providers of color but supply and demand doesn’t match up,” Miller said. “There’s a shortage of providers of color becoming physicians. So we need to invest in the reeducation of providers.”
In order to become a provider on Spora Health, medical professionals must go through an interview process and participate in the Spora Institute. The Spora Institute serves to reeducate providers and help them understand their implicit biases.
“Within med school, there is a curriculum around health equity but that only happens in the first year of the program,” Miller said. “What tends to happen by the end of residency is that a lot of these implicit biases tend to surface again because the training curriculum and environment does not incorporate equity and doesn’t think about disparities in certain populations.”
Spora Health is actively raising a $1.2 million seed round. So far, the company has closed $1 million of that round.
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