GOQii Technologies Pvt Ltd, a startup which offers a device that helps customers track fitness, has raised an undisclosed amount from Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of mobile internet firm One97 Communications.
Incorporated in 2013 by Vishal Gondal, California-headquartered GOQii has offices in Mumbai and Shenzhen (China) also. It offers a combination of wearable technology, expert-led personalised coaching and elements of social philanthropy (karma) to enable its users to make a permanent shift to a healthier lifestyle. For the same, it focuses on sustained engagement and goal reinforcement, and offers a complete ecosystem as a single integrated solution, which is a combination of technology and human connection.
Gondal, who is also Indiagames’ founder and former CEO, has invested in a lot of startups.
"With the coach marketplace model, we intend to have 1,000 coaches on board by the end of this year offering the customers an opportunity to choose who they want to be coached by. We are happy to have celebrated coaches like Satya who is an independent coach and is witnessing a strong demand from our users for his services,†said Gondal.
GOQii has an existing user base of less than 50,000 customers in India, integrating with 35 major fitness bands, including Jawbone, Fitbit, Garmin, Moov, Misfit and Sony. It operates across countries like Singapore, India, Malaysia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the US.
Sharma invests in early stage startups from his company’s One97 Mobility Fund. He has also launched an online recharge portal called Paytm.
"Wearables is a piping hot sector both globally and in India. Juniper Research estimates global shipments in wearables to increase to 150 million units by 2018. Add to that the health and fitness segment and we are looking at a massive opportunity. GOQii, with its combination of technology, world's leading experts, coaches and karma points on a single platform, is uniquely positioned to lead in it," said Sharma.
Last year, the company raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Neeraj Arora, business head at WhatsApp Inc, and Marco Argenti, vice president (mobile) at Amazon Web Services.
GOQii is also backed by angel investors Amit Singhal (Google), Anil Godhwani (Habitera), Bharat Vasan (My Basis), Shriram Nene, Esther Dyson, Goutam Godhwani (Simply Hired), Kanwaljit Bombra (Dell), Madhuri Dixit-Nene (Bollywood actress), Mahesh Samat (Epic), Mike McNamara (Flextronics), Prashant Gulati(TiE), Sanjay Parthasarathy (Indix), Sanjay Vaswani, Steve Luczo (Seagate), Taher Khorakiwala, Deepak Shahdadpuri (DSG), Rajan Anandan (Google), S Somasegar (Microsoft) and Vijay Vashee (Microsoft).
