Exit Scenario: Glo-Up

Ever since the emergence of wearable devices, the smartwatch industry has been booming. Not only major companies such as Apple and Samsung but also a number of startup companies dove into the blue ocean of booming wearable device market to ride the wave. Fitbit was one of the companies that highly amused the users by balancing the tracking physical bios for athletic enhancement such as counting steps and how many calories were burnt. It seemed like Fitbit was dominating the market; however, ever since Apple made its new Apple watch in 2019, the market was completely dominated by Apple alone. With the continuum with all the apple products, Apple was able to entice users with usability and minimalistic design.

Nonetheless, Google, which has not stepped into the wearable device market yet, decided to acquire fitness wearables company Fitbit for 2.1 billion dollars which is a 30% premium on Fitbit’s market cap. With the wings of Google’s open-source ideology, Fitbit planned and built AI integrated wearable devices to compete with the big guy in the industry. However, the most shocking IPO acquisition in the 21st century was not between Google and Fitbit but it was between Fitbit (Google) and a small company called Glo-Up that produced the world’s first sports armband for tracking and easing emotional stress.

Glo-Up started off with a group of four colleagues from California College of the Arts. Glo-Up saw the need for easing the stress of NCAA student-athletes and made an armband that checks in with the users when they are stressed. Since none of the wearables focused on the mental part of the wearable industry, Glo-Up had gotten a lot of attention from a number of athletic programs around the nation. Since the market that was once a blue ocean turned into the red sea, Glo-Up had a hard time enticing their main users, student-athletes, to purchase their armband. In spite of the fact that Glo-Up almost had to shut down, Fitbit reached out to them and offered 1.2 billion dollars for an IPO acquisition. While everyone was wondering why Fitbit bought a dying small startup, James Park, who co-founded Fitbit and has been a CEO and president of Fitbit, found great interest in Glo-Up’s patent technology of AI cleaning out data from GSR (galvanic skin response) to interpret the emotional state of the users. Although IPO acquisition is still in the process of legalizing the deal since there shouldn’t be any regulatory scrutiny in the market, the merging between Fitbit and Glo-Up is one of the most frequently mentioned topics in the Silicon Valley.