Weight Loss Era, an online fitness platform, has received RMB 20 million (approximately USD three million) in pre-A series financing, Li Yuxin, CEO of the company announced on Monday.
This round of funding was led by Shenzhen Oriental Fortune Capital, an investment management company based in south China, followed by Hongxi Fund, a public assets management company.
According to tech news site 36Kr, the funding will be mainly used for three business channels including product development, sales-team building and brand building. The two targets of the company in 2016 include attracting more than 10 million users and integrating the online community, their video teaching segment and diet foods on the entire platform.
Founded in 2014, Beijing-based Weight Loss Era has more than 30 employees and aims to provide health-conscious solutions such as weight loss classes, nutritional meal plans and social media motivation for customers. Its app, called “Jianyue”, was launched last February. “Jianyue” means “reduction” in English. The app aims to build an online community to attract people to exercise in groups, track their diet, manage their weight and take quizzes on diet knowledge.
In addition, Weight Loss Era has a series of derivatives such as diet food, intelligent hardware products, classes for weight loss and offline products. Among them, diet food will be an important business for the company. Liu said that they plan to launch the product in approximately two months.
China’s weight loss industry has exceeded RMB 80 billion (USD 12 billion) and is still increasing at an annual rate of 15%-20%, according to Science and Technology Daily. Weight loss and fitness are becoming an increasingly popular topic in the country. Corresponding “Internet Plus” products are constantly emerging, including Jiaolian, a sports course and coach booking platform, FitTime, a video teaching platform, and Keep, an online community for fitness.