CoPilot Systems Inc., which previously went by the name of Delta Band Inc. as the makers of its DeltaTrainer platform, announced a close on its $5.86 million Series A round, bringing its total capital raised since its founding to over $10 million.
Chicago-based Hyde Park Venture Partners led the round and was joined by several repeat investors from CoPilot's previous seed round, including Los Angeles-based TenOneTen Ventures LLC, Alpha Edison and San Francisco-based Maven Ventures. New investors in the company's funding include Washington, D.C.-based seed funder Rise of the Rest and Chicago-based Sandalphon Capital LLC.
Co-founded in 2018 by Matt Spettel and Gabe Madonna, South Side-based CoPilot connects users of its mobile platform to one of its personal trainers, who can be booked for unlimited, one-on-one virtual sessions for a price of $99 per month. The company's trainers offer users personalized workouts and nutrition plans as well as coaching efforts during workouts, all of which are logged using the CoPilot app available on iOS devices.
While fitness-related efforts are the startup's specialty, Spettel, the company's CEO, said using the funds from the Series A to expand into other offerings will be important going forward as the company looks to scale up.
"First and foremost, this round is all centered around taking the initial success we found around our model of combining human coaches with clients who are looking to form lasting behavior change and increase their well-being and taking that initial level of success we found and, for lack of better words, scaling it up by 10x, and it sounds unoriginal but that is quite literally our plan," Spettel said. "Our vision for CoPilot is really around delivering on that promise across all sorts of verticals in which those human problems exist, any area where you may need more accountability, or may have anxiety around something, or may be held back by a lack of confidence or motivation. One-on-one coaching is clearly the solution to that, and so we want to be the leader in delivering that, starting in fitness today and growing to many, many other applications."
Spettel, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, said the company will continue to tap into Pittsburgh's tech and engineering communities to build out its workforce, currently at 51 employees as of the start of the year. That includes creating a new executive-level role, a position Spettel said will be akin to a vice president of growth and chief marketing officer role, to bring someone with an executive-level of experience onto the team as it looks to roughly triple its employee count by the end of the year. That figure also includes recruiting more coaches, which the platform currently has several dozen available to pick from, to a count that is well over 100.
"I'd say head count is a bit of a vanity metric for a coaching company because when you think of a startup, you think of a bunch of engineers, product designers and growth people, but we also have this entire side of our organization which deals with managing our coaching staff as well, and so that that inflates what you might expect from a startup at our stage a bit," Spettel said. "Humans and full-time employee head count is so intimate to what allows us to deliver this product, which is more or less a human being that you get access to."
Hyde Park Venture Partners felt confident in leading CoPilot's lasted funding round.
"Hyde Park Venture Partners invested in CoPilot because of how impressed we were with both the team and the product," Allison Lechnir, a partner at the firm, said in an email statement. "People really struggle with holding themselves accountable for working out, and CoPilot makes it so easy, even for beginners — and you see that in how frequently and how long their users stay active."
Spettel declined to disclose the company's revenue. In May 2021, the startup closed on a $3.3 million seed round.
