Sacramento-based Flexia Pilates has raised $4 million in seed funding to grow sales of its smart reformer, which is an exercise station that uses artificial intelligence and sensors to help people work out correctly.
Kaleen Canevari, a mechanical engineer and a Pilates instructor, founded the company two years ago to make home equipment for Pilates workouts.
“I saw a big gap in what was available,” she said. “Most reformers are very unfriendly for a home.”
Most Pilates reformers are big, heavy, complex and designed to be used in a Pilates studio with an instructor, she said.
She decided to tackle the problem of how to take the reformer out of the studio. She had been a traveling Pilates technician working on reformers for about five years, and she decided to design and build a home version herself.
The home version she built is adjustable, can be tilted up to conserve space and can come with an online Pilates instruction subscription, which also picks up real-time information from sensors on the reformer to make sure the user is working out optimally. Buyers don't have to use the online capabilities, but then they don't get the benefit of the sensors.
Flexia earlier this month raised $4 million in seed funding led by Jerusalem-based venture capital fund ADvantage, with participation from Atlanta venture capital firm Phoenix Capital Ventures, Colorado-based venture capital firm Techstars and New York-based venture capital firm Calm Ventures.
Canevari, CEO of the company, designed the Flexia reformer to be attractive like furniture, because it takes up space. Since she developed it during the pandemic, she made sure she sourced nearly all components domestically.
With the physical product developed, she also worked on the business side. She attended the Lean Innovation Cohort, a program of the Carlsen Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at California State University Sacramento, and she also went through the FourthWave Accelerator, a training and networking program for female-led technology startups, also supported by the Carlsen Center.
Having gone through those programs helped her get into the Techstars Sports Accelerator, a Boulder, Colorado-based seed accelerator that can invest in companies that go through its program.
“It’s been exciting to see her growth from Lean Innovation and FourthWave to Techstars — and now raising this money," said Cameron Law, executive director of the Carlsen Center.
Canevari built the first four reformers herself. They are now contract manufactured in the Midwest. The reformer sells for $3,495, and the monthly subscription for the online technology is $39 a month.
She said the competition isn’t other exercise equipment, it is physical Pilates studios, which charge $30 to $40 per group session, she said. Her reformer pays for itself in just over a year if used twice a week, she said.
The company has eight employees, and Canevari said she plans to use the investment to grow the company and build more reformers.
