Can A.I. help whip you into shape?
Summer is the season of sweaty training camps and outdoor workouts — and also, apparently, a new cohort of fitness and sports startups in Massachusetts.
I've been tracking three startups worth knowing about, founded by veterans of Android , the mobile operating system owned by Google; Whoop , the maker of a wearable fitness tracker; and Runkeeper , a coaching app that is now owned by the sneaker company ASICS. One of the startups, HYBRD, participated in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program in Silicon Valley last year.
Here's what they're up to.
Ray
It's hard to think of a startup with a stronger pedigree than Cambridge-based Ray . One founder, Rich Miner, helped create Google's Android operating system in the early 2000s, and the other, Colin Raney, was chief marketing officer of PillPack, an online pharmacy startup that Amazon acquired in 2018. Among the company's early investors is Founder Collective , the venture capital firm in Cambridge whose co-founder was named Secretary of Economic Development for Massachusetts last week. Dave Balter of True Ventures , a cryptocurrency entrepreneur as well, is another backer.
When you download the Ray iPhone app, you converse with an artificially-intelligent personal trainer — you can pick a man's or woman's voice — who asks you about your goals.
Ray asks about what kind of equipment you have at your home (kettlebells, a pull-up bar, etc.) and what you'd like your workout schedule to be. Then, your AI personal trainer creates a workout routine designed to help you meet them, complete with videos. It also communicates with you via text messages to remind you to stick to the plan. For example: "Hey Scott, excited for tomorrow's first workout! Let's start strong and work towards losing those 5 pounds."
Ray can also answer questions that you text it, and pull in data from the Apple Health app about other fitness activities you may be doing, like using a Peloton or taking a long walk.
"What Ray wants to do is wants to be a personal trainer that understands everything that's that's going on with you, and adjust to those needs," Raney said. "The idea is that over time, it becomes just a much, much more personalized experience."
It's a bit like the 2013 movie " Her ," but if Scarlett Johansson's A.I. persona was trying to help Joaquin Phoenix's character achieve six-pack abs.
Raney said the company is currently offering the app for free to attract users, rather than focusing on "the monetization question," — in other words, how to charge those users.
HYBRD
Several of HYBRD 's co-founders, including CEO Ben Katz, worked together at Whoop, the Boston company that makes a fitness wristband used by athletes like golfer Rory McIlroy, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lebron James of the Los Angeles Lakers.
The named HYBRD refers to "hybrid" athletes who participate in several different sports or activities, like powerlifting and long-distance running, using different training regimens. The team is split between San Francisco and Watertown, where their office is in the back of a gym, Arsenal Crossfit.
"It's very convenient because we're training pretty seriously, but [people advise you to] get really close to your users," says co-founder and chief product officer Mats Terwiesch. "We figured [that] spending every day in the gym would be as close as it gets to HYBRD's [app] users."
The HYBRD app is currently available only for iPhone; an Android versions is in the works, said Terwiesch. The app offers a seven day free trial, and then the meter starts running: either a $99 annual subscription, or $14 monthly.
"The mission of HYBRD is to be the central performance hub for all of your health and fitness data," Terwiesch said, combining data from both cardio- and strength-oriented activities. "There's all these great hardware products across the ecosystem. You have Whoop to track your sleep and recovery. I wear a Garmin to track my running. I use a Wahoo bike computer to track my cycling. …What we felt like was missing was this central hub that is software only [and] puts all the pieces together."
Participation in the Y Combinator program includes $500,000 in funding; Terwiesch says the company has raised additional funding since then, but he didn't want to divulge the amount. With AI tools making it easier to build software, and the company operating in a capital-efficient manner, Terwiesch says the company's founders "hope to never have to raise [money] again."
HYBRD also hosts a weekly " workout club " in Boston and San Francisco for so-called hybrid athletes.
The Next Next
The latest startup from entrepreneur and investor Jason Jacobs probably won't actually be called The Next Next, but Jacobs has a podcast about building the company with that name. In 2008, Jacobs created one of the earliest iPhone apps that allowed runners to track their workouts, Runkeeper. That startup was acquired by ASICS , the Japanese maker of running shoes, in 2016 for $85 million. After that, Jacobs started a combination media, online community, and investment entity called MCJ (which originally stood for My Climate Journey), focused on climate-related technologies.
"I've recently turned my attention to… youth sports, and even more specifically, hockey as an initial market, because that's where I'm spending a large percentage of my time as a dad." (Jacobs' son plays hockey, and he often sets up a backyard rink in the winter.)
In his podcast and his writings about the new venture on LinkedIn, Jacobs has said that he is focused on how artificial intelligence might be able to augment human coaches, to help kids "stay engaged with their training" in between in-person practices and games.
But Jacobs wasn't ready to say more about the company, except that it doesn't yet have a name, or employees other than him: "I have nothing substantive to cover yet," he wrote via email, adding that he is still "trying to figure out where the substance lies."
Stories by Scott Kirsner
Read the original article on MassLive .
