Bangalore-based Orobind Fitness Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs a mobile marketplace of fitness experts under the same brand, has raised $200,000 (about Rs 1.26 crore) from a group of angels including Harpreet Singh Grover, co-founder, Cocubes; Lalit Mangal, co-founder, CommonFloor.com; and Toppr.com co-founder Zishaan Hayath.
The capital will be used for product enhancement, app development for the iOS platform, marketing, as well as expanding to new cities.
“We will enter Hyderabad, Pune and Gurgaon this year. We will also add a ‘chat with expert’ option in our app,” said Satya Vyas, co-founder, Orobind Fitness.
The company was founded in June 2014 by IIT-ians Vyas and Shubhanshu Srivastava. Vyas had previously worked with a food chain called Mountain Trail Foods and an oilfield service company Schlumberger, while Srivastava had worked at Snapdeal and Newgen Software Technologies.
Orobind is a mobile marketplace of fitness coaches that assigns experts based on the user’s location, preferred workout time, and preferred workout days. Prior to subscribing, it allows users to get access to detailed profiles of the expert, and claims to offer police verified curated experts who have undergone stringent background checks.
The app is currently available only on the Android platform.
While the download of the app is free, it charges Rs 6,000 for 12 sessions of fitness coaching. The company claims of having served 100 paid customers in the last three months, and it takes a fee of about 25 per cent. The company has a team of six members, while it has on-boarded 45 coaches.
In January this year, another marketplace for fitness service providers Gympik.com, had raised $135,000 (about Rs 86 lakh) in seed funding from Capvent’s managing partners Tom Clausen and Rohan Ajila, as well as manufacturing firm Haldyn Glass.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)