Toronto-based Curv Health, a healthtech startup whose platform allows users to extract physical health and performance metrics through video taken on a mobile device, has closed a $1.5 million seed round.
“Our bet is that the future of measuring human motion is computer vision combined with machine learning.”
– Shea Balish
The round was led by Henri Deshays, a partner at Newfund Capital, with participation from Globalive Capital, NewStack VC, Angel List Syndicate, ASICS Ventures, and several angel investors from Spain. With this raise, the company plans to further expand its SaaS offering directly to health and educational institutions across North America. This raise represents the company’s first round of funding.
“Measuring human motion has traditionally relied on human eyes or costly hardware. Our bet is that the future of measuring human motion is computer vision combined with machine learning, which is far more intuitive, scalable, cost-effective, and in some important respects, more accurate,” said CEO and co-founder Shea Balish. “We’re hyper-focused on augmenting health providers with scalable tools that offer musculoskeletal insights on musculoskeletal health, and over time, we’ll make crude metrics like Body Mass Index (BMI) obsolete.”
Curv Health builds machine learning tools and therapies that extract biomechanical features of human motion and shape from a two-dimensional video. It then uses this information to inform preventative and rehabilitative care. The tool is targeted toward athletes, coaches, trainers, and professionals, to better diagnose and predict movement pathologies and improvement opportunities.
Founded in 2017, Curv said it has bootstrapped through licensing its technology via API. So far, the company has signed a deal with giant, Japan-based shoe manufacturer ASICS, also an investor in this seed round. The Chronicle Herald reported in 2018 that Curv had already signed on teams from the National Basketball Association (NBA) and more than 500 universities and colleges.
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“The Curv team has deep experience across the engineering, scientific and operational aspects of the problem their solving… and they’ve demonstrated this by securing impressive revenue and partnerships early on,” said Deshays of Newfund Capital.
Curv is an alumnus of Next AI in Toronto, and ASICS Tenkan Ten, an incubator based in Barcelona. The company also recently opened an office in Halifax. Last year, the company won the National Football League’s “1st & Future” competition at Superbowl LII.
“Direct and indirect costs of musculoskeletal injuries are large, even for healthcare,” said Nick Moran, general partner at Chicago-based New Stack Ventures. “Yet the timing of the market seems fertile, with payers opening reimbursement pathways for validated digital tools and therapies.”
“By joining forces with Curv Health, ASICS can expand service offerings in the area of movement intelligence, envisioning the future of sport where motion analytics are informative, cost-effective, and widely available for every athlete,” said Hiro Kageyama, president of ASICS Ventures.
Image courtesy Curv Labs