Exer Studio: an AI Companion for Virtual Fitness Classes
TL;DR:
- Exer Studio is live on ProductHunt today. Please head over there to ask us any questions and to show some love! This is our AI leaderboard / companion for any virtual fitness class (work w/ Zoom, IG Live, Youtube, etc.)
- We raised some more money ($2M to be exact, bringing total raised up to $4.5M) from a group of awesome new investors including: GGV, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures, Range VC, Service Provider Capital, Shatter Fund, MyFitnessPal co-founders Mike and Albert Lee, and existing investors Signia Venture Partners and former Zynga and Rally Health COO, David Ko.
I sent this note to the Exer team the afternoon of March 12th, 2020:
That night, Denver Public Schools announced they were closing…and we have been Working-From-Home ever since. So much for 1 week at a time! The world hasn’t been the same since, but as humans one of our better traits has always been adaptation and innovation. As you can see, the team is still all smiles (and growing)!
As this crazy year continues to progress, one of the side effects millions of people have been faced with is the maintenance and fulfillment of our health and wellness. A significant segment of the choices that people had for staying in shape and moving their bodies were taken away this year, and it’s changed the way nearly everyone thinks about how they’ll manage their fitness moving forward.
At Exer, we’re on a mission to help everyone to move, train and play better. As you can imagine, this new normal heavily affected how we thought about achieving that mission as March and April unfolded. Almost the entire fitness industry was put on furlough while gyms and studios shut their doors around the world. The effort to move fitness experiences online — often on the back of the now-omnipresent Zoom platform — was nothing short of heroic, as everyone at every level of the fitness industry fought to maintain their relationship to their community remotely.
Even as things have begun to slowly open up, more than 60% of consumers are convinced they may never go back to an enclosed gym environment. We saw that trend coming even before the pandemic, but as the world shut down we moved up our timeline for a fitness live streaming companion app that would leverage our AI to replicate engagement tools that were previously only available in physical studios.
Exer Studio — A Companion to Virtual Workouts
Exer Studio is a Mac App (browser version coming soon) that adds Orange Theory-style effort zones or a Peloton-style leaderboard to video streamed workouts, on any virtual platform like Zoom, Youtube, or IG Live.
We use real-time motion tracking on 20+ body points to produce a workout score for you without requiring any extra hardware — just the camera on your device. We can show you your current exertion level, your cumulative effort, and your ranking on a leaderboard that includes everyone else in your workout session.
With gyms closed and having trouble opening back up, fitness communities lost the accountability and competitive spirit they had during in-person sessions — Studio gives them those powerful elements back. Built as a tool for coaches and studios around the world, Studio doesn’t replace fitness community leaders, but rather enhances their ability to run fantastic virtual sessions and provide even better coaching to larger groups of athletes.
We believe that virtual is here to stay, and it presents a huge opportunity for coaches to grow their reach and have a larger impact on people around the world. Brick-and-mortar gyms will greatly benefit from maintaining and expanding their virtual arms, and Studio can provide them with a differentiated offering to engage that audience.
During the summer, we started showing Studio and our PT app to a few folks…and ended up raising some more money to hire faster ($2M to be exact, bringing the total raised up to $4.5M) from a group of awesome new investors that believe in our vision and team. Here’s the list: GGV, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures, Range VC, Service Provider Capital, Shatter Fund, MyFitnessPal co-founders Mike and Albert Lee, and existing investors Signia Venture Partners and former Zynga and Rally Health COO, David Ko.
We’ve been beta testing Studio with coaches in SF, NYC and Denver for the last few months, and we’re ready for you to join the waitlist! Once you join, you can download the app ahead of time on your laptop and use the “try it now” feature to get a feel for what’s coming your way. We’ll be opening up our network of coaches and classes for people to use regularly very soon.
We launched Studio on ProductHunt today, so please head on over to our page to ask us any questions and to show some love.
Mahalo,
Zaw
Co-Founder and CEO, Exer
LI or Twitter
