The Future of Health and Wellness

We teamed up with our portfolio companies at CES 2021 to dive into the future of health & wellness.

The discussion was inspired by our thesis that sports are a proving ground for innovation beyond the category. Specifically within health & wellness, we’ve seen that sports are a microcosm of the market at large. Whether athletes are looking to maximize performance or minimize risk of injury, the demands of elite sports make athletes ideal early-adopters of consumer healthcare innovations.

Today, startups are bringing these solutions beyond the field of play and enabling everyone to transform how they manage their wellbeing.

Jeffrey Morin (Co-Founder and CEO, Liteboxer), Ari Tulla (Co-Founder and CEO, Elo), and Rishi Mandal (Co-Founder, Future) joined us to share what this looks like in action across fitness, nutrition, and overall health management.

Here are some insights from our conversation:

Why is Future starting with fitness, to transform the way we manage our day-to-day health?

Rishi Mandal: One of the very incredible things that we saw three years ago was that there are five things that we do on a daily basis that add up into having a disproportionate impact on our health outcomes. Those five things are how we move, how we eat, how we sleep, how we deal with stress or mental health, and then whether or not we take our meds. What we saw across the landscape was that, for 99% of Americans, all five of those things are completely unmanaged.

We’re spending a hundred billion dollars a year trying to get healthy, but 80% of us don’t exercise enough or at all. On the flip side, we saw a group of people in high-level athletes who have benefited from having other people help manage all of those day-to-day aspects. A personal trainer is one example where a coach manages your fitness for you, derives the insights, and turns all of that into a simple set of instructions. So, that’s what Future tries to do.

How is Liteboxer innovating at the intersection of fitness and gamification?

Jeffrey Morin: The best workout is one that you actually do. So, forming habits is what Liteboxer is all about.

We’re trying to absorb users into their workout, to create a mind-body sync that melts the time away. We do this by using data, music, and trainers that are the best in the world to deliver an experience that makes you feel like there’s actually a sparring trainer in your home. We then combine hardware, software, and content, to make something that’s so compelling that it feels like a game. Overall, we’re leaning into the gamification side of fitness to really propel and extend the market.

What challenges in the US healthcare system spurred the vision for Elo, to transform food from cause of disease to medicine?

Ari Tulla: Today, 60% of the US population adults have one or more chronic conditions and diet-related chronic conditions are the number one cause of death today in the country. On top of that, most people don’t know this, but Americans’ life expectancy is declining for the first time since the 1918 pandemic, the Spanish flu. And we at Elo, we believe that this trajectory is reversible by the right nutrition.

We are starting with active men in their forties and fifties, and try to help them to optimize their health. Middle-aged men are the most prone groups today for obesity, type two diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other metabolic diseases. Yet, there are very few specific services available for them. They want to have raw data, science, and somebody who can guide them through the complex world of nutrition. Elo is doing that by offering precision nutrition service that helps men age with confidence.