Fitness tracker GOQii raises fund from Paytm Founder Vijay Sharma
Incorporated in 2013 by Vishal Gondal, California-headquartered start-up GOQii, offering hi-tech device to track fitness, has offices in Mumbai and Shenzhen (China). The company has recently raised an undisclosed amount of funds from the Founder & CEO of mobile internet firm, one97 Communications, Vijay Shekhar Sharma. The company has been making headlines for its fastest growing Indian e-commerce shopping websites Paytm, launched in 2010.
Significantly, GOQii offers a combination of wearable technology, expert-led personalised coaching and elements of social philanthropy 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 himself has invested in a lot of star-up projects has also founded Indiagames’."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 35 major fitness bands including Jawbone, Fitbit, Garmin, Moov, Misfit and Sony. It operates across big countries like Singapore, India, Malaysia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the USA.
Reportedly, Sharma invests in early stage startups from his company’s One97 Mobility Fund.
"Wearables are 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 in the same. GOQii, with its combination of technology, world's leading experts, coaches and karma points on a single platform, is uniquely positioned to to lead in it," said Sharma.
Worth recalling, the GOQii Company has raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Neeraj Arora, Business Head, WhatsApp Inc, and Marco Argenti, Vice President (mobile) at Amazon Web Services.
Significantly, GOQii is also backed by angel investors Amit Singhal (Google), Sanjay Parthasarathy (Indix), Deepak Shahdadpuri (DSG), Rajan Anandan (Google), S Somasegar (Microsoft) and Vijay Vashee (Microsoft) to name a few.
