Vishal Gondal founded GOQii looks at large funding round

GOQii, a fitness-based wearable technology start-up, begun by Vishal Gondal, also founder of Indiagames, is looking at a ‘large round’ of funding.

The company is looking to aggressively tap the huge opportunities in this space globally. It is learnt to be in talks with a few investors for a funding round expected at $20-25 million and to get closed in this quarter.

Gondal, the chief executive, would not disclose the amount he hoped to raise. “We will be doing a larger Series-A round and are going to talk about it soon. Lots of investors are in talk with us,” he said.

Started in early 2014, GOQii offers a combination of wearable technology, supplemented with personalised coaching by fitness experts, focusing on the health and lifestyle space. The company has raised close to $3 million in the angel round and is supported by known technology experts such as Rajan Anandan and Amit Singhal of Google, Neeraj Arora (WhatsApp business development head), Marco Argenti (Amazon Web Services) and Mike McNamara (chief executive of Flextronics), apart from filmstar Madhuri Dixit and her husband, Sriram Nene.

Gondal’s previous venture, Indiagames, a game development and publishing company, was successfully acquired by The Walt Disney Company for around $100 mn in 2011.

“GOQii is a fitness coaching system. It takes your data from various devices and various apps and then this data is given to a fitness coach, who works with you on the cloud to help you get fit,” said Gondal. “There are few players in the weight-loss segment but we are more into the health and the lifestyle space, and our model is very comprehensive and holistic.”

The company is now taking it to another level by connecting the fitness enthusiasts with well-known coaches across the world through a marketplace model. The coaches will work on a revenue sharing and engagement model with GOQii, and can make considerable amounts of additional income using the platform, the company said.

“This year, we are expecting to rope in around 1,000 coaches and our target is to have at least 10,000,” Gondal said.

Within about four months of launch in India, GOQii claims around 10,000 users in the country and expects the number to grow exponentially. It has also launched the solutions in America, Singapore and UAE.