Powered by Nex
Today, we have a number of exciting new developments to share about Nex and an update on our evolution into new forms of motion entertainment.
Highlights:
- New Product: Today we are officially launching our newest app: Active Arcade, a curated collection of new and fun mobile motion games. Active Arcade is a free-to-play app available on the App Store for iOS or the Google Play Store for Android.
- $25m Series B: We are excited to announce Series B funding of $25 million led by Blue Pool Capital and Samsung Ventures as we bring motion-based entertainment to more than a billion people worldwide.
- New Team Members: We are excited to also welcome Simu Liu (Marvel’s Shang-Chi), Thierry Henry (international football legend), Sabrina Ionescu (WNBA Star), Albert Pujols (LA Dodger/ World Series Champion), Steven Chen (Co-founder, YouTube), Matt Mullenweg (Co-Founder WordPress), Roham Gharegozlou (Founder, Dapper Labs), Nikil Viswanathan (CEO Co-Founder, Alchemy) SparkLabs Global Capital, Hyphen Capital, and executives from Uber, Facebook, Disney, and Masterclass to our amazing investor community that already includes the NBA, Harris Blitzer Sports Entertainment Ventures, Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks), Steve Nash (Brooklyn Nets Coach, 2x NBA MVP), Sue Bird (the GOAT), Jewell Lloyd (WNBA All-Star, Olympic Gold Medalist), Jeremy Lin (NBA Champion, CBA All-Star), and many more across entertainment, sports, and technology.
Transforming Activity into Play
Physical play is second nature. It’s something we’re born to do. Play is fun, social, and naturally makes us move more so we also don’t have to explain to ourselves why it’s good — it just is.
That idea of play gets lost as we get older and spend more of our leisure time in the digital world. Moving our bodies and getting active starts to become something scheduled. It becomes that obligatory, sweaty thing we do in penance for cheeseburgers, noodles, and pizza. Being active very quickly starts to feel like work.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” — George Bernard Shaw
At Nex, we believe that being physically active shouldn’t be hard work. Moving every day should be fun for everyone, anytime, anywhere, and connected through a shared social experience. We saw a big opportunity—not to force the world into a new fitness concept or buy into expensive workout equipment—but rather to reimagine and rekindle what we all once took for granted.
The Problem Behind the Problem
The global pandemic has drawn even more attention to the already huge and growing problem of more sedentary lifestyles across the world. 3/4 of people say that being in shape is important to them yet many are insufficiently physically active, including up to 80% of youth according to the World Health Organization. Through our work in sports, we also learned that most American children fall well below the physical activity guidelines of 60 minutes or more of daily physical activity according to the CDC.
Why is there such a disparity between what we know and what we do? We realized the problem behind the problem was simple, but not so easy to address.
Today there are many high-tech exercise programs enabled by connected fitness equipment, built for an elite subset of the population. For those who can afford it, a plethora of workouts—with an emphasis on “work”—are at their fingertips. However, these solutions are expensive, high friction, and generally inaccessible.
At the other end of the spectrum, it’s never been easier and less costly to access quality entertainment. Without even leaving home, we can watch the latest movies, stream live concerts, play our favorite video games, and even throw virtual parties. As compelling as these experiences are, most of them involve very little body movement. In short, they’re sedentary.
The global inactivity gap is reinforced by an accessibility gap. Getting active today is too hard and too expensive for most, and the sedentary alternative of effortless entertainment is all too readily available.
The Solution is Play
At Nex, we believe there is a better, more fundamental way to move. We’ve identified the vast whitespace of high-quality entertainment that incorporates physical activity. The goal is not to “exercise”, but to have fun using your body movement. Having fun while moving is one of the purest definitions of play.
When we’re kids we instinctively understand the value of physical play — on the playground, in our backyard, or sometimes by turning our living room into an imaginary playhouse. We didn’t need to learn how to play as children and we could magically transform an empty cardboard box into an amusement park ride or a stray broom handle into a lightsaber.
But unlike the old days, now the standard of engagement for active fun must be on par with the best video games and digital entertainment. It has to be immersive, connected with friends, and it has to make us feel like we have superpowers.
We believe the answer to the inactivity gap is to reinvent physical play for the digital world.
Instantly Accessible Motion-Based Entertainment
Using a proprietary combination of computer vision technology and familiar gameplay concepts, we’ve created an entirely new type of digital playground that’s accessible on any camera-enabled device. We’ve been hard at work to design motion-based experiences that power active, physical play using nothing more than your existing mobile device.
While the general category of motion-based entertainment is not new, we believe our approach to it is different in many ways, the biggest being accessibility.
Motion gaming consoles like Microsoft Kinect and Wii and more recent console-enabled games like RingFit and Beat Saber are hugely popular. Yet they still reflect just a small fragment of the true demand, limited by the need for a costly new console, headgear, or extra accessories.
To truly democratize active play, we want to deliver world-class experiences without compromise using the devices and screens people already have. With accessibility as our core value, we focused on being the first to bring motion-based games to the masses.
Introducing Active Arcade
It is with great excitement that we’re officially launching Active Arcade, combining our mobile computer vision expertise with compelling entertainment that transforms activity into play. Active Arcade features a wide variety of motion-based games that anyone can play using their body movement, made instantly accessible on any modern mobile device with a camera.
Each game has a different gameplay style and genre, so there’s something for players of any age or level of activity. There are quick and fun reaction games, family-style party games, intense action games, adventure games, and even music rhythm games.
Active Arcade is a new digital playground that's always with you. It's meant to be played anywhere, with anyone, using just the space around you. In early testing, we’ve seen people play at home, at work, in warehouses, hospital waiting rooms, and even on airplanes.
We encourage you to download the latest version in the App Store for iOS or the Google Play Store for Android. Active Arcade now includes a number of new games, including SuperHits a dynamic music rhythm game, Space Pong a futuristic 3D sports game (and our tribute to the original Pong), and Bunny Hop a family-style adventure game that will keep you jumping through levels for hours.
We know you’ll love playing these games anytime, anyplace, with friends and family. We’re also confident it will make you feel like you were naturally born to play.
Why Nex?
We started out as a team of engineers who enjoyed playing pickup basketball and solving hard technical problems while working together at Apple. We shared a vision that mobile technology could actually help kids in every corner of the earth use their smartphone as a platform to engage in physical sports. But first, we had to figure out how to use mobile computer vision for an experience comparable to what was possible with VR gear, minus the gear. So we started on the most technically demanding activity we could imagine — basketball.
The result was HomeCourt, an AI-powered app capable of tracking your real-time basketball performance — on par with professional solutions, using only your iPhone. Since its launch HomeCourt has tracked nearly 1.7 billion dribbles and 160 million shots in over 200 countries.
Through HomeCourt, we studied our users and learned that the majority of their time was spent on active play — not limiting their use to just serious basketball training. They simply loved our fun, gamified, and immersive physical activities.
We now had the insight that most people were really just looking for fun new ways to move, and we had developed the foundational technology along the way to convert body movement into something much more engaging on the devices they already owned.
With the launch of Active Arcade, we’re now accelerating our journey to help everyone simply play more. And we know that great things for our mind, body, and soul will come along for the ride.
At Nex, we‘ll continue to be relentless in creating new and fun ways for everyone, everywhere, to move.
Now let’s play.
