Mumbai-based chat-based health and fitness platform, FitCircle, has raised an undisclosed amount in Pre-Series A round of funding from Webaroo co-founder Beerud Sheth and Ravi Mantha an ex-President of TiE Singapore.
Founded in 2013 by Aarti Gill and Mihir Gadani, FitCircle, a flagship product of Zywie Ventures Pvt Ltd, is a chat-based health & fitness platform which provides free coaching to individual users. Besides, people can also buy products on the platform as recommended by the experts.
Few of its corporate clients include P&G, Medtronic and Nielsen among others.
The startup provides daily workout challenges and enables users to track their activities through their smartphones. It caters to private fitness communities or circles and helps them interact with each other through online and offline mediums.
The online medium involves human experts and ‘automated bots’ that offer expert advice while the offline medium involves organizing boot camps and related activities to drive user engagement and motivation, led by human healthcare/fitness experts.
Currently, the company has over 2,500 members, out of which 45% are said to be active on the platform.
Speaking on the development, Aarti Gill, co-founder of FitCircle said, “We have a right mix of human experts and fitness bots driving the paradigm shift from curative to preventive healthcare. Our focus currently is on keeping the users engaged and motivated with the right kind of content and expert intervention.”
The startup will utilise the funds to improve its technology platform, expand customer acquisition and on board more fitness experts.
According to Aarti, platforms offering gym memberships isn’t sufficient enough to drive ‘motivation’. “If someone wants to make fitness a habit, but has very less time, we first try to identify trigger points in their behavior that can drive engagement. Through this approach we are looking to disrupt the existing doctor and fitness platform industry.”
The company has also claimed that it will be raising the Series A round of funding in the coming 5-6 months.
Few other players in this space have also raised funding in the recent past. Personal fitness coach app, Orobind, raised Series A round of funding few months ago. Earlier in June, health and fitness app, HealthifyMe, raised an undisclosed amount from a group of individual investors.
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