Bengaluru-based fitness startup HealthifyMe raises $6 mn from IDG, Blume and Inventus

It plans to use the capital to grow to 5 million users within the next two years

Bengaluru-based health and fitness startup HealthifyMe, which offers virtual fitness coach services, has raised $6 million in Series A funding from IDG Ventures India, Blume Ventures and Inventus Capital. The firm is targeting users looking to lose weight and competes in the $2 billion health and fitness industry in India.

HealthifyMe has scaled its service from 30,000 users in January 2015 to half a million users today across its Android and iOS apps. It now plans to use the capital to grow to 5 million users within the next two years, expanding its technology prowess and growing its team of wellness and fitness trainers.

While HealthifyMe can be downloaded and used free of cost by users, it functions as a mere calorimeter. In order to get access to virtual coaches and other social features, users have to pay between Rs 800 and Rs 1,200 on a monthly basis. If users sign up for six or twelve month packs, the company ships them a fitness tracker from one of its partner vendors.

"The unit economics on the business model is extremely strong and that's one of the key reasons our investors have backed us. We're completely asset light, unlike players such as VLCC and Talwalkars who have 25-30 per cent costs in real estate, those are non existent for us," said Tushar Vashisht, CEO and co-founder at HealthifyMe.

Moreover, using technology the company is able to manage 200 users with a single coach, whereas in the offline world that coach would be able to manage a maximum of 10-15 customers. HealthifyMe is further experimenting with artificial intelligence to enhance that number up to 350 users by the end of the year, improving the unit economics while at the same time easing pressure on growing its base of coaches.

"We built the best lifestyle tracking product that's possible to build in India but even then there was no good business model around it. People were willing to pay in India, but not for the software component, it was for the services component," added Vasisht, citing the reason why the company pivoted its business model, after which it raised $1 million in seed funding led by Micromax.

HealthifyMe did not share the number of paying users on its platform, but did say it's in the tens of thousands. It has also signed up corporate partners and currently has over 40,000 employees on its platform. The firm claims its adding between 30,000 to a lakh users onto its platform on a weekly basis.

Today, HealthifyMe's chief competitor is GOQii, which is a marketplace for virtual fitness coaches, and has raised a combined total of $13.4 million. However, while GOQii functions across the fitness arena, HealthifyMe is largely focused on weight loss and other lifestyle diseases, also the company says it's deploying the raised capital solely to grow in India, unlike its rival.

"When HealthifyMe started off, everyone thought of it as a GOQii competitor in the sense that the company was focusing on the hardware. I think the company has pivoted and become much larger that that by becoming device agnostic and ultimately empowering Indians," said Sanjay Nath, managing partner and co-founder of Blume Ventures.