It can take as long as 254 days to form a new habit, but one health and wellness startup has high hopes that AI can greatly improve people’s chances of success.
Wellness and fitness startup Zing Coach has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Zubr Capital and Triple Point Capital. The investors join London-based health tech company Palta, which co-founded and is also an early-stage funder of the startup, whose other startups include period-tracking app Flo and diet app Simple Fasting.
Founded in 2021 by Tanya Parfenyuk and Walter Gjergja, Zing Coach is a consumer app that offers personalized health and fitness training plans. The startup offers a photo-based body composition scan, fitness testing with motion tracking, and personalized workout routines based on users’ goals, energy levels, and time to complete the workout.
Zing Coach plans start at $14.99 per month.
Thanks to the boom in generative AI, the startup is offering more personalized coaching plans than ever before, Zing Coach CEO Parfenniuk explained, telling Business Insider that the technology is crucial to keeping users motivated while following a fitness or health routine.
“Recent advances in large-scale language modeling mean that we can now develop virtual trainers that can have natural conversations, adjust their tone of voice based on a user’s emotional profile, provide instant feedback on form, technique and performance, and help users correct their mistakes and motivate themselves when they feel like giving up,” she said.
Zing Coach joins a growing number of health startups that are using AI to enhance their services: Heali, which uses AI to provide personalized nutrition plans to address chronic health issues, raised a seed round last fall, and Shimmer, which offers AI-based ADHD coaching for adults, raised $2.2 million in venture capital funding earlier this year.
Parfenniuk said that with the new funding, Zing Coach will focus on expanding into other wellness areas, such as stretching, yoga and pilates. Using AI to keep users motivated is a big part of that plan, he said.
“We believe motivation is the main reason why many people don’t achieve recommended levels of activity, so addressing that barrier is our primary focus,” she said. “We need to build an AI fitness assistant that understands each user’s motivations, recognizes their struggles, and can offer equal empathy and encouragement.”
We’re exclusively revealing the 13-slide presentation deck that Zing Coach used to raise $10 million in its Series A funding round.
