New Delhi: An Indian fitness startup backed by Mohandas Pai’s Exfinity Venture calls itself the “Zomato of fitness”. The company is on its way to showcase itself at the Google Entrepreneurs Demo Day next week at the search giant’s headquarters at Mountain View, California.
Mumbai-based Fitternity is the only Indian startup to be chosen among 800 applicants to represent themselves at the two-year-old Demo Day
For the early-stage startup, this could be an opportunity to get exposure to a number of international CEOs as well as get financial support from their companies. This edition is meant for woman founders. No Indian startup has previously been selected to the Google Demo Day.
Last year’s Demo Day event gave a chance to 11 startups to give five-minute pitches at Google’s office. Neha Motwani and her co-founder, Jayam Vora, applied to the programme online and got a call to showcase their startup in five minutes at Palo Alto.
Motwani that their firm will stand out from any other fitness startup because India is at least 5-10 years behind the US fitness market. “Startups here are just getting their fitness journey started and are only reaching out to ‘fitness hunters’, while we are looking to target ‘hunters’ and ‘seekers’ and ‘sitters’.”
In her research, she found that there are ‘fitness sitters’, or those who need a trigger to start a regime; seekers who are actively looking to be fit but not contributing actively; and ‘hunters’ who are advanced marathoners and want to try new forms of fitness.
So far, the two-year-old company has got a seed capital of $1.5 million from Exfinity Venture and Saha Fund.
Google, on its part, said through its work with startups, it is trying to push entrepreneurs who already have “amazing” companies and this can help open doors to major investors and partners in Silicon Valley. “The event has been a great launching pad for many and this is a good example of the entrepreneurial community that we’re seeing across India,” Mary Grove, director of Google for Entrepreneurs.
Last year’s Demo Day Women’s Edition winner Bridgit, an app that keeps construction projects on track, went on to raise $1.7 million from Hyde Park Venture Partners.
Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner, Exfinity Venture, said the startup has created a platform for fitness and how they saw the challenge of the largely unorganised nature of the market, and successfully aggregated fitness providers.
Motwani was a consultant with Aeon Hewitt till 2014 when the idea came to her. She surveyed 500-600 people to check if a gap exists that allows users to find the right services as well as for customers to be able to review fitness facilities.
Source: The Economic Times
