Startup Spotlight is an interview series where we ask health, fitness, and wellness startups that use Terra, to share their wisdom from their journey to success and also where they see fitness data going in the future.
In this Spotlight, we connected with Toby Cannon, founder, and CEO of Myles Wellbeing, a well-being platform that encourages employees to be more physically active.
Myles is a well-being platform that encourages employees to be more physically active.
It moves past traditional office steps challenges to help employers to provide something simple, inclusive and focuses on sustainable change. It harnesses gamification and powerful social dynamics to encourage teams to exercise more often.
The Myles Wellbeing platform rewards users for physical activity. We connect with a range of wearables and fitness trackers to automatically access this activity data. Once we receive this, we use MET (Metabolic Equivalent Tasks) to normalise the activities, allowing users to compare hundreds of activities and sports, all on the same leaderboard.
I realized I was becoming more inactive as I was spending long periods of time at my desk, so I decided to start running.
I like setting big audacious goals, so I booked in for a marathon, giving myself only a couple of months to train. Just 2 weeks before the marathon, the pandemic hit so the marathon was postponed. I initially created the app to help me and my family sustain our running training. We realized just how powerful this was for motivation so I decided to launch the app for others to use too.
We bootstrapped the first 18 months or so before raising our pre-seed round in January 2022.
A few months after launching the very first version, Mike McCreadie, my co-founder joined the team to help turn it into a company.
Our aim is to make things as simple and easy as possible for our users.
We wanted people to continue using their current fitness tracking app, which meant we needed to support a fair few of them. Luckily, we discovered Terra which helped to solve this headache for us.
We raised a relatively small, £250k pre-seed round in January this year, made up of some great angel investors, an institutional investor and a VC.
We utilised our existing networks and asked for introductions where possible. We made sure to be super open and transparent to all investors which helped us to find some fantastic investors that really aligned with what we were doing.
Relating to the gap around incomplete data, I think the future is wearables and fitness trackers which capture much more data.
For example, more discrete trackers that don't need to be taken off in contact sports, or devices with much longer battery lives that don't need to be removed for long periods of time. Whilst wearable and fitness tracker use has skyrocketed in the past few years, it's still not adopted by everyone all of the time. I think the biggest gap is having incomplete data because people perhaps take off their Apple Watch whilst they play a contact sport, or maybe someone forgets to manually record an activity.
You can access a free demo of the Myles Wellbeing platform
