Fitness tracker startup GOQii has raised Series A funding worth $13.2 million (Rs 88 crore) led by New Enterprise Associates and Cheetah Mobile, with participation from Great Wall Club, DSG Consumer Partners, Ilkka Paananen (CEO and co-founder of Supercell) and Pravin Gandhi (co-founder of Seedfund) reports Mint.
GOQii will use the funds to expand to China and other unnamed markets, and is working on Chinese content before launching it there. The report adds that Cheetah Mobile’s investment may help in GOQii’s China expansion as well as on Xiaomi’s Mi user interface, given Cheetah Mobile’s chairman Jun Lei is the founder of Xiaomi.
GOQii founder Vishal Gondal launched the fitness tracking solution coupled with human coaches in February 2014 and the fitness solution in August 2014 in India. The GOQii app integrates with 35 other fitness bands like Jawbone, Fitbit, Garmin, Moov, Misfit and Sony. It currently employs 100 people and claims to have 1,000 fitness coaches in the US, the Middle East and India. It also claims to have 100,000 users on the platform. As of now, the company has offices in the US and in China, other than India.
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Previous funding:
– In July this year, GOQii had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma in his personal capacity.
– In August last year, it raised undisclosed angel funding from WhatsApp business head Neeraj Arora (who’s now on the board of Paytm) and Amazon Web Services vice president (mobile) Marco Argenti.
The platform offers a solution comprising of a water-resistant fitness tracker GOQii Band which has features like full touch display, a vibrating alarm and automatic wireless syncing via Bluetooth. As of now, the company offers its Life Program with coach subscriptions for 3, 6 and 12 months at Rs 4,000, Rs 7,000 and Rs 12,000 respectively.