- Romanian fitness startup Hyperhuman is building a platform for the production and dissemination of workout materials.
- The platform uses AI to both recognize the exercises being performed, as well as to edit the videos and recommend workouts to users.
- The company has recently acquired €500K from investors Early Game Ventures, Sparking Capital, and Simple Capital.
While emerging tech is often seen within the context of socioeconomics, as that’s where it’s expected to have the biggest impact, a particularly exciting prospect is its application in the nooks and crannies of already existing technologies, creating something unique and unexpected.
Being the next leap that it is, we’ve seen AI being applied to finance, security, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and yes, even fitness, with companies like the recently-acquired Fitbit looking to implement AI into their offerings, and others jumping forward to AI fitness trainers.
It’s notable, then, that the stoutly named Hyperhuman’s main focus is not to replace someone or something, but to provide a faster, better service to both trainers and to those who follow them.
The pitch is deceptively simple.
Hyperhuman has built an intelligent platform combining machine learning, object recognition, and AI-driven video editing, all packed inside their own marketplace, the aim being to streamline the path from fitness content creator to athlete.
Here’s Bogdan Paul Predusca, CEO & Co-Founder of Hyperhuman, explaining exactly how it works.
“Our goal is to allow trainers to focus on their moves and let our AI-powered app do all the heavy lifting. No fancy setup or video editing skills needed. Trainers record short videos with the key moves and the AI engine does its magic. It extracts key insights and metadata from the videos and turns them into reusable blocks of content, removing the complex process of video production and editing.
It’s fast and it’s getting even faster over time.
They can reuse their greatest exercises to create completely new video workouts. We also help them reach new clients with their best performing exercises and video workouts and this creates a huge opportunity for them to monetize their content.”
This makes perfect sense. While an AI trainer can provide access to basic and standardized workouts, the global fitness industry is immense and ever-changing, with just the US market being estimated at around $100B. That is to say nothing of the fact that different people in a similar situation might require a more nuanced and individual approach each.
This concept is in good hands, too, with Bogdan Predusca and David Teodorescu being former product leader and design lead at Fitbit, respectively, and Dan Nica, who was a lead product manager at a fintech company and has previously co-founded another fitness start-up with Bogdan, all having extensive experience in the field.
Bogdan adds, “Most of our competitors are the plain old fitness apps, fitness videos & streaming services and some rising computer vision & AI fitness apps. It’s important to let these companies know that we actually want them to succeed and focus on their core value prop rather than creating monolithic video content that only lives in their closed ecosystem.
They can pick and choose what type of content is right for their audience, for example, a smart rowing machine offers complimentary yoga, pilates & stretching video workouts.”
The content created on the platform constantly feeds back into their proprietary AI, making it both faster and more intelligent. The idea is to provide highly personalized fitness content that adapts to users in real-time based on their goals, biometrics, and training environment.
Leading the latest funding round is Early Game Ventures’ Dan Călugăreanu, who believes that the digital publishing and content monetization platform will become a key player in the industry by connecting content creators with end-users and businesses that need a constant feed of personalized video content to complement their core business.
Early Game Ventures’ Dan Călugăreanu
“Hyperhuman’s mission is to help trainers succeed so their promise is to always have a free version of our product. Our hope is that Hyperhuman will become the go-to product for fitness trainers and a key player in the global fitness industry. This investment will help them build and extend their proprietary video AI technology, launch the product by spring and acquire a critical mass of users. At the same time, we are ready to sustain Hyperhuman for the next round!”
The app is currently in private beta for a selected group of trainers, but any trainer can join their waiting list and get early access on their website.
Emanuil is a freelance writer from Bulgaria who also enjoys writing music and keeping up with emerging technologies
