Chinese fitness app Keep raises $360m
Keep, a Chinese mobile app that provides fitness training programs, has raised $360 million in Series F funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund.
Hillhouse Capital, Coatue Management also joined the round. Existing investors including BAI, GGV Capital, Tencent Holdings, 5Y Capital, and Jeneration Capital re-upped.
Founded in 2014, the company's core offering is a basic home training app that offers 1,200 self-developed courses plus customized solutions covering fitness training, running, cycling, and yoga. Keep has more than 10 million members.
Content upgrades are central to Keep's strategy. This includes recruiting social media fitness stars from Europe, the US and New Zealand to lead classes. The company is also looking to get into user-generated content (UGC). It has developed a dedicated UGC platform and collaborates with 2,200 fitness professionals as contributors.
Keep has a complementary range of consumer products, with sales said to be growing at an annual rate of 100%. Its biggest seller is a smart bike that integrates hardware, live coaching, user data, and user communities. The bike ranked first in its category in last year's Singles Day shopping festival in China.
Another key commercialization initiative is the introduction of live fitness courses. Keep has a live course team of nearly 100 people including course designers, live coaches, and operational staff. Its live sessions have attracted more than one million users.
Prior to this investment, Keep had raised $267 million across seven rounds. Ventech China and BAI committed $5 million in Series A funding in 2015, with a $10 million Series B - featuring GGV and Ventech - coming later the same year.
GGV and 5Y then co-led a $32 million Series C in 2016, with Tencent later providing an extended round. In 2018, Goldman Sachs led a Series D of $127 million and Jeneration led a $80 million Series E last year.
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