As close childhood friends in Wisconsin, Zaw Thet and Clint Gehde took divergent career paths as they got older.
Thet went into the technology world, heading to Stanford for school and getting involved in the Bay Area’s startup scene, including seven years as founder and CEO at 4Info, a mobile advertising platform.
After his time at 4Info and a couple of years spent considering his next move, Thet launched a venture firm, Signia Venture Partners. To date, the firm is on its third fund, each totaling $85 million.
Thet said his investment strategy was to make one or two deals a year with emerging technology companies and work closely with founders. Rather than having the companies come to him, he’d routinely do deep dives into various industries, finding what he thought were the most promising startups in each.
In 2017, he became interested in the connected fitness space and began doing research in pursuit of an investment.
That’s where Gehde comes in.
After leaving Wisconson, Gehde ended up in Denver and began his career in athletic training. Nearly two decades later, he’s launched gyms around the city and trained some of the top local athletes, including professional football players and national team athletes.
As Thet began his search into the fitness space, he connected with Gehde. After six months of research, the duo found that there wasn’t an investment to make.
Rather, an opportunity to start a company.
“We think there’s something here,” Thet remembered thinking. “Has AI got good enough to bring to the phone and augment the coaching experience for people?”
In the fall of 2018, they began working on an AI training solution for phones. In the spring of 2019, they made it work and launched Exer Labs, along with co-founder and CTO Sean Cook.
Now came the challenging part for Thet.
"I had to make the hard decision to look my wife in the eye and say 'this really cushy VC firm that I started? I think I have to leave to start my own company,'" he said.
Her initial reaction?
“You’re fucking crazy,” Thet recalled with a laugh, adding that she's been supportive throughout.
Exer officially launched from stealth today with its first app, the Perfect Plank trainer on the App Store and on Product Hunt.
The application identifies 18 to 20 key areas on the body to ensure you’re doing a plank with correct form. With real-time feedback, the AI can give you tips on how to improve your form for the exercise.
There is no additional hardware required, as your phone’s camera is the only thing needed and user data stays on the phone and nothing gets sent to the cloud.
This first application is a test for Exer to prove the applicability of its technology, as it plans to roll out a series of apps for different exercises and routines in the future.
“We’re not trying to replace coaches, we’re trying to augment them,” Thet said. “This app is the first one of a series of apps that helps coaches give better training to their clients when they’re at home.”
For Gehde, Exer gives him an opportunity to reach many more people than he could in a gym environment.
“I thought, how do we impact millions of people rather than hundreds per day,” he said.
The company, which raised a $2.5 million seed round in June 2019 from Thet’s Signia Venture Partners, has since added nearly $500,000 from Denver-area angel investors following a move here in September.
Thet said that move was motivated in-part by Gehde already living here, but also by the city’s availability of tech talent, affordability and quality of life.
“We just didn’t feel like you had to be in San Francisco to be competitive from a tech standpoint,” Thet said.
With this launch, Exer is looking for customer feedback on the Perfect Plank to learn how users interact with the app. With the coronavirus pandemic forcing many people to get creative with workouts, Thet is hopeful that Exer will provide an effective at-home solution for trainers and users alike.
Now, months after he made the decision to leave the VC world for the startup scene, Thet is thankful he made the jump.
“It was probably a crazy thing, but it turned out to be the right thing,” he said.
