Investing in ROOK
The following excerpt is from Allied’s original deal memo to investors. To review investment opportunities in full, please consider joining the syndicate at Allied.vc/join
There are now more than 100 personal devices on the market that track our health and fitness data—everything from the Apple Smartwatch to Fitbit, Oura ring, and the EightSleep smart mattress. The global wearable fitness tracker market was valued at $45B in 2021 and is expected to reach $192B by 2030, growing at 17.5% CAGR (source).
Needless to say, people love tracking their health and fitness data, and the market is expanding at a very rapid pace. In fact, there are currently more than 300k health & wellness apps globally, and over 200 new apps are being added daily.
Unfortunately, for the 100+ fitness trackers on the market, each brand reports data in its own format. As a result, the generated bio-data isn’t standardized, making it very difficult for app developers to receive and utilize health data.
For example, the Oura ring tracks “total sleep time,” whereas Garmin tracks “time in bed.” Polar tracks “active calories,” whereas Garmin calls them “day calories.” Even the date format varies from brand to brand.
As a result, app developers and health & wellness companies face enormous financial and operational challenges when trying to gather & interpret data from 100+ personal devices.
Enter ROOK (formerly RookMotion)
ROOK enables health, wellness, and fitness applications to access and use data from any wearable device in real-time via API.
Similar to what Plaid has done to standardize financial data, Rook’s “Health-data-as-a-Service” (HaaS) solution is provided by API and charged per active user.
One API, Endless Possibilities
Going a step further, Rook’s AI models offer personalized recommendations based on user behavior, habits, and health status. The company’s long-term vision is to become the backbone infrastructure layer for health and wellness data worldwide.
Aside from the obvious use cases, like B2C fitness apps, Rook is experiencing significant uptake across various high-value enterprise clients, including:
Corporate clients; for employee health & wellness benefits.
Insurance companies, incentivize and reward customers for staying physically active and healthy, thus reducing premiums.
Gyms and fitness clubs that have a members app.
Gaming companies; to utilize move-to-earn among players; and
Big pharma; to streamline clinical trials and receive real-time data from participants.
Rook’s founders are biomedical engineers with years of experience in medical devices and designing hardware-software integrations for fitness, wellness, and health applications.
They’ve assembled an impressive, multidisciplinary team of software engineers who’ve built the data processing and algorithmic capabilities to interpret data with greater precision and detail than any other solution in the market.
Why we are thrilled to support the team at Rook
1) Large and Rapidly-expanding Target Market
There are now more than 1B connected wearable devices worldwide, and this number continues to grow.
Given the large and rapidly-expanding market for health & fitness data, we believe this current adoption trend among large-scale enterprises will continue (and accelerate).
2) Accelerating Traction and Early Indications of Market-Pull
With Rook’s proprietary advantage as the only solution currently capable of providing real-time data standardization, we believe Rook has the potential to become the dominant player in a market with minimal competition.
For instance, Rook has the fastest revenue growth we’ve ever seen from a Seed-stage company. After completing Techstars in Q2’22, they launched their commercial product in August and have since grown to over [redacted for privacy] in enterprise contracts.
We believe such impressive revenue velocity provides strong early indications of product-market fit and, more importantly, market pull, whereby demand for Rook’s solution is so great that enterprise customers are seeking them out.
3) Strong Customer Feedback
Initial customer feedback & interviews have been very positive, generating an early net promoter score of [redacted for privacy]. As such, we believe this feedback suggests strong early indications of customer satisfaction, leading to increased spending, net dollar retention, and word-of-mouth referrals.
4) Highly-talented Team with Deep Domaine Expertise and a History of Successful Execution
Headquartered in Miami, the team has deep technical and industry expertise, comprised of biomedical and software engineers with years of experience designing software integrations for medical devices, and health applications, and have led clinical research teams at pharma giants Novartis and Roche.
Such deep technical knowledge has allowed Rook to build an impressive technological moat based on superior data standardization and normalization processes, making them the only API solution with real-time data processing capabilities.
Therefore, if we are correct in our thesis and the company achieves its projected milestones over the next 3-5 years, we believe Rook has strong potential to generate a significant venture-scale return for stakeholders.
Certain information contained in this post has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of Allied Venture Partners. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, AlliedVP has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; AlliedVP has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by AlliedVP. (An offering to invest in an AlliedVP fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by AlliedVP, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others.