Vishal Gondal's health & fitness wearable GOQii launches US beta

GOQii, a wearable devices venture launched by Indiagames' founder and its former CEO Vishal Gondal, has launched a limited US beta.

As part of the exclusive beta offer, the package costs $99 and consists of the GOQii band activity tracker and app, 12 months unlimited one-on-one personal coaching, as well as 'karma' points to support worthy causes. Available on a first come basis, the offer is open only to 500 initial customers in the country.

The development was first reported by TechCrunch Launched early 2014, GOQii is headquartered in California with offices in Mumbai and Shenzhen (China). It offers a combination of wearable technology, expert-led personalised coaching and elements of social philanthropy (karma) to enable its users to make a permanent shift to a healthier lifestyle. For the same, it focuses on sustained engagement and goal reinforcement, and offers a complete ecosystem as a single integrated solution, which is a combination of technology and human connection.

The GOQii Band comes with full touch display, a vibrating alarm, ultra-lightweight water resistant construction with skin sensitive materials, and automatic wireless syncing via Bluetooth LE. Its key functions include a watch, a motion sensor that can track steps, calories, distance, active time as well as 'Karma Points', which is basically a virtual currency for philanthropy.

The human connection is also provided in the band since it enables the user's GOQii coach to remotely vibrate the band to motive the user.

In India, the company offers subscription for GOQii, which includes all elements of its ecosystem (including band, experts, coach and karma) for six and 12 months. The plans are available for Rs 6,999 and Rs 11,999 for the half-yearly and yearly packages, respectively.

Lat year, the company had raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Neeraj Arora, business head at WhatsApp Inc., and Marco Argenti, vice president (mobile) at Amazon Web Services.

Other previous investors in GOQii include Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Inc; Bollywood actor Madhuri Dixit-Nene and her husband Shriram Nene besides Anil Godhwani (Habitera), Bharat Vasan (MyBasis), Kanwaljit Bombra (Dell), Esther Dyson, Goutam Godhwani (Simply Hired), Mahesh Samat (Epic), Mike McNamara (Flextronics), Prashant Gulati(TiE), Sanjay Parthasarathy (Indix), Sanjay Vaswani, Steve Luczo (Segate), Taher Khorakiwala, and Vijay Vashee (Microsoft).