Matt Spettel is hoping to change the way people go about their fitness journeys. With CoPilot, a platform offered via a mobile app, users are given an individualized fitness plan and access to a personal coach as part of an effort that Spettel believes is likely to prove more successful for people looking to get in shape than if they were to go about the process on their own. Since Spettel launched CoPilot along with Co-founder Gabe Madonna in 2019, it has gone on to raise millions of dollars in venture capital funding, the most recent being a $5.9 million Series A round in January.
From an early age, I have been fascinated by building products to entertain and solve problems. From founding a game studio at 14 years old to an automated chemical pumping business at 17 to CoPilot at 20, I have never stopped building in areas I am passionate about.
As you’d expect from someone who spent all of his time building robots and video games, I was extremely unfit and unhealthy back in 2015. Fortunately, that was when I met my best friend and now CoPilot Co-Founder Gabe Madonna. Gabe was a great friend and personal trainer to me as I turned around my health and built a deep passion for fitness and exercise. Jumping forward three years to 2018, Gabe and I found ourselves brainstorming random ideas at the intersection of strength training and machine learning, and the original concept for CoPilot was born.
Although we were both still juniors at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, respectively, we began devoting huge amounts of time to developing our idea. From custom wearable hardware to AI-generated workouts, we pivoted through a wide range of concepts over the next year.
Eventually, by the summer of 2019, we were confident we had a solution to a real and extremely painful problem: Staying consistent with exercise. We realized that the vast majority of the fitness industry was focused on “what” to do — workouts, classes, equipment, etc. — but almost no one was addressing the much more fundamental question of “how” to do it — how to fit exercise into your busy life, how to stay motivated, how to build a habit around fitness.
With CoPilot, we created a combination of a 1-on-1 human coach that holds you accountable and builds you a personalized plan, and cutting-edge technology that empowers that coach to understand exactly what you’re doing and operate at a scale that makes coaching affordable. CoPilot makes you nine times more consistent with exercise and gives you your own dedicated coach for $99 per month.
Over the last two and a half years, we’ve grown CoPilot from Gabe and myself in a garage to 50+ full-time employees and thousands of paying clients across the globe. We’ve raised $10 million in venture funding from amazing investors across the country and have ambitious plans to continue to scale aggressively over the coming years.
Between working with my best friend in the area I’m most passionate about and changing thousands of lives every day, I know I have the best job in the world, and I’m just getting started.
ABOUT MATT SPETTEL
Title: Co-founder and CEO, CoPilot
Age: 24
Year company founded: 2018
What is your dream job? “Entrepreneur, duh.”
