RunKeeper Raises $10 Million From Spark Capital, Steve Case, And OATV

Erick Schonfeld

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily... → Learn More

Monday, November 21st, 2011
Image (31) runkeeper.jpg for post 335291

The race is on to create a new class of consumer-driven health companies. One of the most popular health and fitness apps on the iPhone, RunKeeper, is started tackling by making it easy for people to measure their exercise, but now it is busy building out an entire “Health Graph” so that all sorts of health data can plug into its service.

The Boston-based company raised $10 million in a Series B financing, led by Spark Capital.  Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated, along with existing investor OATV. The company has 14 employees and is looking to hire more.

RunKeeper is gunning to become the Facebook of Fitness by tying together data from all sorts of fitness apps and services. Since it opened up its Health Graph API in June, 40 services are no integrated. Third party data sharing is still relatively small, but it is doubling every month.

As Rip wrote in June:

But what is this “Health Graph”, exactly? RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs wants you to “imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user’s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more”, that has the sole purpose of delivering an “ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user’s own historical health and fitness data”.

If it can assemble all your fitness and health data and deliver it to you in its dashboard, RunKeeper has a shot at spreading well beyond fitness buffs to anyone who wants to take control of their health.


Financial-organization: Spark Capital
Website: sparkcapital.com
Launch Date: June 1, 2007

Founded eight years ago, Spark Capital is a leading venture capital firm focused on early stage startups. Spark’s portfolio includes companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, AdMeld, OMGPOP (acq Zynga), ThePlatform (acq Comcast), and 5Min (acq AOL). With offices in Boston and New York, Spark invests across the globe and across stages, from a $250k active partner at a seed stage, to $25m to establish category leadership. Spark’s tight-knit group of partners focuses on a number of areas including: advertising...

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Steve Case is one of America’s best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs and philanthropists, and a pioneer in making the Internet part of everyday life. Steve co-founded America Online (AOL) in 1985, when the Internet was in its infancy. Under Steve’s leadership, AOL became the world’s largest and most valuable Internet company, and helped drive the worldwide adoption of a medium that has transformed business and society. AOL’s early focus on ease of use and social media set...

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