Lifesum Launches Movesum, A Step Tracker To Shock You About Calories

After raising a $6.7M Series A round to bolster its position, health tracking startup Lifesum has added another arrow to its quiver in the form of a new app called Movesum. You can download it here.

After studying the health category, Lifesum tells me that they decide the classic pedometers and step counters (such as Pacer) have become too bloated with features and gone beyond what most people need to stay healthy. Of course that’s their opinion and I don’t mind apps adding features. But it can be off-putting for the average Joe. Meanwhile, the Moves app, which was acquired by Facebook, actually tracks and maps your location as well as your distance travelled, which frankly can be a little creepy.

Thus Movesum is a very simple app which tracks how many steps you’ve taken, encourages you to take a 7 day streak in your movement, and set up a daily goal.

The twist is that as well as displaying how many calories you’ve burned, it also displays pictures of food that you might eat and how many steps it would take to burn off the equivalent calories. Thus Movesum puts your daily movement into context and makes you mindful about the energy in different types of food. As a way to concentrate the mind, it’s pretty shocking. (Did you know one beer is 163 calories, or 3,275 steps? I’m just off for a very long walk…)

“The simple truth is that people don’t need to move very fast to be healthy. They just need to move more. Movesum makes it fun to move more on a daily basis, and hopefully makes you take an extra walk instead of taking the car or the bus,” says Henrik Torstensson, CEO and co-founder of Lifesum.

Meanwhile, Lifesum has been showing decent growth in the last year, being named as a Best of 2015 app by Apple in multiple country app stores, being a launch partner for both the Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear S2, and – they claim – growing revenue 1,400% in the United States year-over-year.

The Stockholm-based startup is backed by German multinational media company Bauer Media Group and SparkLabs Global Ventures. Features in the Lifesum app include the ability to scan barcodes to quickly add food intake data, a database of 200+ exercises with associated calorie burn, and the ability to integrate with third party fitness data from the likes of Runkeeper and Withings.