Bengaluru-Based FeetApart Raises Angel Funding From from Vishal Bali of Nielsen Singapore and Other Investors

FeetApart, an employee engagement & wellness platform based in Bangalore has raised angel funding from Vishal Bali, a senior professional from Nielsen Singapore and a consortium of angel investors across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai. The financials of funding were remain undisclosed.

FeetApart, founded in 2014 by health enthusiasts & techies Abhishek & Ashrith, is a gamified social network for organizations with a vision to inspire and help employees lead a healthy lifestyle at a global scale. The app is available on web, iOS & Android.

There is a big need for employee engagement & well-being at workplaces and health is often neglected with the excuse of lack of motivation and time. Through its proprietary machine learning algorithms, FeetApart personalizes the wellness journey of an individual by suggesting people, activities, goals & challenges and helps in habit formation and rewarding them at achieving personal milestones as well as winning competitions.

"Organizations all over the world are investing a lot in wellness initiatives as it helps improve the culture, employee morale, productivity and reduces attrition & overall costs. Exercising and staying fit is the new drug and can combat stress which is so prevalent in today's population, especially the 9 to 6 workforce", the founders say.

seedX, a high touch platform facilitated the entire fund raise process. Says Rajiv Raghunandan, founder of seedX, "Once we bet upon a venture, we work with them extensively prior to fundraising too. In this case we were working with Abhishek & Ashrith since August of last year on different aspects of the business model. What we liked about the FeetApart model is the passion of the founders and the clear visibility into a profitable business".

"FeetApart has a great B2B2C model in driving health & wellness in the corporate world. The gamification with team competitions, challenges and rewards also allows HR to engage employees in an innovative manner thus driving up the overall health & productivity index of a company's workforce" –

Investors.

Bengaluru-Based FeetApart Raises Angel Funding From from Vishal Bali of Nielsen Singapore and Other Investors

FeetApart, an employee engagement & wellness platform based in Bangalore has raised angel funding from Vishal Bali, a senior professional from Nielsen Singapore and a consortium of angel investors across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai. The financials of funding were remain undisclosed.

FeetApart, founded in 2014 by health enthusiasts & techies Abhishek & Ashrith, is a gamified social network for organizations with a vision to inspire and help employees lead a healthy lifestyle at a global scale. The app is available on web, iOS & Android.

There is a big need for employee engagement & well-being at workplaces and health is often neglected with the excuse of lack of motivation and time. Through its proprietary machine learning algorithms, FeetApart personalizes the wellness journey of an individual by suggesting people, activities, goals & challenges and helps in habit formation and rewarding them at achieving personal milestones as well as winning competitions.

"Organizations all over the world are investing a lot in wellness initiatives as it helps improve the culture, employee morale, productivity and reduces attrition & overall costs. Exercising and staying fit is the new drug and can combat stress which is so prevalent in today's population, especially the 9 to 6 workforce", the founders say.

seedX, a high touch platform facilitated the entire fund raise process. Says Rajiv Raghunandan, founder of seedX, "Once we bet upon a venture, we work with them extensively prior to fundraising too. In this case we were working with Abhishek & Ashrith since August of last year on different aspects of the business model. What we liked about the FeetApart model is the passion of the founders and the clear visibility into a profitable business".

"FeetApart has a great B2B2C model in driving health & wellness in the corporate world. The gamification with team competitions, challenges and rewards also allows HR to engage employees in an innovative manner thus driving up the overall health & productivity index of a company's workforce" –

Investors.

FeetApart - A Social Network Based Health Platform

FeetApart is a social network based health platform (both web and mobile) for employee engagement and wellness. Based out of Bangalore and founded by two fitness enthusiasts, Abhishek Roy and Ashrith G, both being techies and having work experiences of several years. The team at FeetApart aims to motivate employees to pick up healthy habits and lifestyle and helps employers to reduce overall organization costs by improved employee productivity, reduced employee disengagement & attrition.

Feetapart is a competition-based platform where users form teams, share their physical activities and encourage each other to earn more points and get their team up on the leader board. These points are translated into frequent rewards in the form of cash & coupons. Also, they have a Gujarat based mobile app development company that works closely with them in their customer acquisition and sales tasks.

Abhishek says, "Me and Ashrith were part of the Data team at Qyuki Digital Media (a Shekhar Kapur & AR Rahman initiative) where we met. I have been a marathon runner for the last 7 years and have always wanted to do something related to health & fitness and the need to inspire others to pick up a healthy lifestyle was clearly innate. Ashrith, meditator for 7 years, conducted online meditation sessions for users across the globe. The idea took shape when Ashrith suggested building a social network around health and fitness. We realized we both complemented each other with the 'mind & body wellbeing experience' and we both loved inspiring others to get healthier. Given the sedentary nature of our jobs, we clearly felt the need of a platform (not just an app) that motivates users to do a little more (physically) and get healthier. Also, organizations struggle with lack of data about how engaged and active their employees are."



Ashrith adds, "FeetApart is built by people passionate about improving the lifestyle of others. To enable this, we have built FeetApart as an ecosystem, not as a product. We have wellness experts on our platform to guide and help our users achieve their health goals. We also have a flexible fitness app integration layer that can integrate with most of the fitness apps and wearable. FeetApart is a data-driven platform. We use data to power our goals and activity recommendation engine as well as an engaging dashboard to provide insights to both employers and employees. Simplicity and understanding of the beginner mind-set towards health and incentives are what make our product easy to use and adapt."



Currently FeetApart, with a team of 4 members, is in talks with other partners who can give them health based data and others with whom they can partner for offline activities. They are also talking to/looking for nutritionists and coaches to partner with us.

When Asked about the future expansion plans, Abhishek says, "We are looking at more fitness app/wearable integrations, intelligent data-driven workout plans, more wellness experts, food tracking, inter-organization competitions to list a few. We envision FeetApart as a global product and have a global go-to market plan for that. We are also in talks with an established organization to build a global consumer version of the platform. As of now we are bootstrapped. Although we are in talks with a few angel investors and are looking for some angel funding now to accelerate our sales and expansion process as well as drive engagement and support for our customers."

Ashrith says "It has been an interesting journey so far, B2B space has shown lots of interest and it's a matter of time when we can have around 10 organizations using our platform. We are also listening keenly to all our prospects and customers and making sure they benefit from our product. We recently exhibited at the GMIC Bangalore event and saw huge interest in our product."

Thinking that mistakes are inevitable and you need to quickly learn from them and move on to better solutions is the key philosophy that the team at FeetApart works on. Also, any work that is done is done while keeping in focus the benefits or values it adds.

With a strong message of "finding something you are passionate about, taking calculated risks and to learn from others mistakes and save time and frustration" for future entrepreneurs, Abhishek has this fear of leaving this world without having a considerable positive impact, for which, we wish him and the entire team of FeetApart, all the luck they need.