Matchup raises $800K to bring wearable devices to businesses

Matchup, the platform for people with fitness trackers to challenge each other and gain incentives, just announced a seed round of $800,000 in funding. They surpassed their plan of $650,000, with $750,000 from an angel investor who wishes to remain anonymous. The other $50,000 came from a group of dedicated family and friends. 

 

Anyone with a fitness wearable knows how bad you feel when you don’t meet your goal. Especially with Chicago’s winter weather approaching, we’re all inevitably going to be doing a lot less walking and a lot more hibernating. Matchup is here to motivate you, connecting 98 percent of wearable devices through their app, so you can compete with friends and coworkers and gain points and incentives. 

 

“For free, we’re solving a very simple problem that nobody is doing. You can create a challenge and compete against a friend, even if you have a different Fitbit and she has a Jawbone,” co-founder and CMO Anthony Knierim said. “Right now, you’d only be able to tell each other what you did or post it on Facebook. These small groups in mini challenges are building this tremendous pipeline that’s allowing us to get in front of them and bring it to their workplace.”

 

Matchup is primarily designed as a B2B business, aiming to reinvent company wellness programs and draw them away from outdated company services with surveys and clunky pedometers to current smart, wearable devices. Knierim has been working on the project for over a year and used what he learned after years at Aon Hewitt to bring his new business to the market. 

 

“I started noticing that companies were increasing their wellness spend by 18 to 22 percent year over year for five years, and participation rate at the younger demographic was declining at the same time,” Knierim said. “I asked myself, how come there isn’t anything out there that is focused beyond participation, and more on outcomes?”

 

He bootstrapped the product until now as he learned more about the market and understood how he wanted to position his product. Matchup isn’t Knierim’s first business, he also helped begin Reboot Illinois, so he knew the value of strong and steady growth. 

 

After a July 1 public launch, the company currently has 27 clients, ranging from small companies like Chicago’s SAVO group to larger ones like Texas’ Advocare. Companies come to Matchup to better understand the wearable market, knowing they can give an unbiased opinion on what’s best for the employers needs, as well as “gain and aggregate data in a meaningful way where you can actually look at behavior change over time.”

 

Matchup generates a large portion of revenue by gaining affiliate revenue from selling the devices wholesale, as well as selling their services to businesses. They currently have five employees and hope to double that by January as they search for more developers. 

 

“The biggest thing hindering our growth is that we can’t grow fast enough,” Knierim said. "We want to strengthen our relationships in the marketplace so we can start actually putting monetary incentives for people, so as they're accruing points they can buy things that are an incentive to them becoming healthier people.”

 

Matchup currently works out of Catapult.