Some impressive investors including Mayo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Mohr Davidow and Aberdare Ventures have thrown $1 million in seed money behind an ambitious Rock Health fitness startup by the name of Wello.
The startup has created an online marketplace that connects physical trainers with clients and enables live, online personal training via video chat.
The seed round, which also saw contributions from Morado Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, PhilQuo Ventures and angel investors, will propel the startup as it readies to launch a new offering early next year.
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Right now, Wello facilitates personalized, one-on-one training sessions between consumers and more than 150 certified physical trainers. The next step is to launch fitness classes led by those trainers so that users can do joint sessions with family or friends in different places, or join a structured class with others who are interested in the same activity and are available at the same time. That would bring down the cost of a session, co-founder Leslie Silverglide noted, which ranges from $35 to $199 per hour depending on the trainer.
For consumers, the value proposition is obvious: more motivation to work out and help from someone who knows what they’re doing, without having to leave home. The site lets users search for trainers based on style and specialty. For trainers, Wello provides an additional revenue stream and the potential to fill typically unbooked hours during the day with appointments. Trainers are screened by the company’s on-staff personal trainer and must take a class on how to train through video.
Wello takes a part of the per-session payment, but not nearly as much as the up-to-80 percent that gyms take from trainers’ fees, Silverglide said. That enables trainers to charge less for a session.
Silverglide and co-founder Ann Scott Plante met as business students at Stanford University and started working on the site at the beginning of 2011. They launched it in a private beta mode in March of this year and publicly in July.
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They won’t say just how many people are using the site, but they will say that those that use it tend to return. “Two-thirds of people that try a session once will come on and try it again,” Plante said, adding that some customers have already done up to 50 sessions in the four months the site has been live.
As far as competition goes, the closest thing to Wello appears to be HealthFleet Inc., a Connecticut e-coaching startup for weight loss. But Wello is probably tapping into the same pool of people who would use services or mobile tools that track and personalize health recommendations like FitKit, Healthrageous and Enforcer eCoaching.
Although the founders are spending their time in Rock Health’s incubator program developing and preparing to launch the new features next year, they aren’t planning on stopping there. “Ultimately we hope to connect people with experts in nutrition, sports therapy, etc.,” Silverglide said.
[Image courtesy Wello]