As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to keep the exercise enthused working out at home, Exer Labs CEO Zaw Thet said the time is right for his latest fitness tech startup. The Denver company announced on Thursday it raised $2 million in seed funding, which Thet plans to invest on building out Exer’s suite of connected workout companies. The startup’s latest app, Exer Studios, launched on Thursday.
“We want to make working out at home more interactive, give better feedback, provide summaries at the end of a workout, so hopefully [fitness coaches] can differentiate themselves and charge more money,” Thet told Built In.
The free Mac app runs alongside whatever video program fitness coaches use to power their virtual workout — whether it’s Instagram Live or Zoom — and aims to create an interactive experience for its users, by organizing workouts into a Peloton-style class, where the instructor guides students through a motivational routine, or Orange Theory-esque episode, where the trainer monitors each students’ fitness levels.
Exer Studios uses the camera of each users’ device to track their individual motion and velocity levels, and generates personal workout data from the company’s algorithm that backbones all of its tech. Participants can also compare their physical intensity and encourage one another through Exer Studios.
The app represents just one fitness venture the startup is working on.
Exer Labs was born out of two years of research into the connected fitness market, which Thet started conducting at his former venture company Signia Venture Partners. A lifelong athlete himself, Thet said he felt so passionate about the venture that he left San Francisco and Signia a year ago to officially launch Exer Labs in Denver.
“There’s a huge amount of technical talent here,” Thet said. “Great culture, great people, and much more affordable, obviously, than the Bay Area.”
The company spent its first year compiling the data set and building out the algorithm intended to power all of its apps. Researchers filmed and labeled more than half a million images of fitness professionals stretching, engaging in yoga and using different pieces of gym equipment to build a convolutional neural network to monitor its users’ movements. The network is powered through edge computing, and the company’s sensors can follow up to 20 points on an individual’s body, watching everything from how a person bends their elbows to their toes. Thet said the company made sure to include diverse fitness professionals in its data set.
“We had to make sure that we filmed all different skin colors, all different body types,” Thet said. “If you just feed it a specific kind of person, [the algorithm’s] really only going to be good at recognizing that kind of person.”
In addition to powering the underlying tech for Exer Studios, the company’s neural network also acts as the backbone to its “Perfect Plank” app, which monitors users’ plank form. It is also used in the company’s Physical Therapy AI coaching app, which is currently being beta tested in four rehabilitative clinics across the country.
To continue to refine and expand its suite of fitness apps, the 12-person company plans to at least double in size “as soon as possible,” Thet said, and is hiring senior software engineers, machine learning experts, business operations professionals and more.
The seed round brings total investment in Exer Labs to $4.5 million. GGV; Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures; Murado Ventures; Range VC; Service Provider Capital; Mike and Albert Lee, co-founders of MyFitnessPal; Signia Venture Partners; and former Zynga chief operating officer David Ko all participated in the round.
