At the Connecting Ideas With Money session that took place on the 20th of January 2023 founder Nikhil Chhabra pitched Areno – a Bangalore-based AI-powered gamified arena for virtual fitness challenges and rewards using an App. The startup is at the beta phase and seeing early traction.
Android app – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.areno.
Website – https://www.areno.in
Product demo – https://youtu.be/kuQfxAPHGEo
Nikhil who is the ‘startup guy’ and his cofounder Sidharth Jain who is a ‘fitness freak’ observed that even though there were numerous fitness apps, none of them had made fitness a fun and rewarding activity while keeping it affordable. This triggered the idea of starting a venture that could address this using pure tech and reach the masses not just in India but globally.
“The key pain point we are addressing is lack of motivation to work out regularly despite understanding its importance. This is primarily caused by the following reasons – lack of time, lack of incentives, no gamification, lack of penetration beyond tier-1 cities and expensive fitness trainers, memberships and devices,” says Nikhil.
“With Areno we are rewarding people for doing workouts by spending 1 min on our platform and participating in various gamified challenges. Areno is a virtual AI-powered arena that promotes fitness through gamification and rewards users with cash vouchers for fitness challenges and working out regularly.”
The founders are chasing “a huge opportunity with fitness services market in India being $2.5 billion”. They are targeting the “Bharat Opportunity” by aiming their App at the young masses of India living in tier-2/3 towns who occasionally work out in silos. These masses do not have access to or cannot
afford gyms at the high subscription fee of other fitness platforms. Since there is no human or
wearable dependency the founders believe they can offer the platform for as low as Re 1 per day.
USPs:
Human-touch free, fully AI-based tech solution. – — Accurate human pose estimation No dependency on wearable devices Get paid to do workouts
Gamified challenges and features
Key highlights:
1. Product: Areno android app is on Google Play Store under public beta.
2. Tech: AI based accurate model to measure workout using only the mobile camera based upon human pose estimation algorithms.
3. Metrics: 2000+ downloads, 1700+ registered users, 6000+ workout attempts on the platform in last 3 months in beta.
4. Customer acquisition: Will be predominantly B2B2C. Strong pipeline built with co- living start-ups and corporates.
5. Customer retention: Additional workouts and skills like yoga, Kinect-like fitness games (with levels) on mobile using existing tech and additional subscription-based personalization
Team:
Nikhil Chhabra:
Co-founder & CEO: Fund-raise, Strategy, Finance and ex COO eTutorWorld
B.E. (Comp Sc) and MBA
IIM Calcutta, ex-Entrepreneur, 18+ yrs
Sidharth Jain:
Co-founder & COO:Product, Technology, Marketing and Operations
ex VP, Blackrock, 9 years
B.Tech. (Comp Sc)
Fitness and gaming enthusiast
Anirudh Koul:
Advisor: AI and ML
TEDx speaker, author
Worked at NASA,
Microsoft, Pinterest
