Moxie Fitness Trainers Platform Now Has $8.4 Million
Moxie allows users to drop-in on barre, cardio, HIIT, Zumba, yoga and other classes run by independent providers.
Moxie, the online fitness platform that connects users to a variety of independently-run online exercise classes, announced it has raised $6.3 million in a new round of fundraising. This brings its total trove of investor cash to $8.4 million.
Founded late last year, Moxie presented a new approach in the ever-expanding range of online fitness options, born or popularized after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Users can log into sessions of group-class favorites, like barre, cardio, HIIT, Zumba and yoga, for per-class fee (though users can subscribe to classes from instructors directly). The front page has a lineup of what classes are beginning soon. Moxie bypasses the subscription model of most other online fitness instruction providers and instead offers instant, easy access.
Eighty-five percent of the money for a class goes to the instructors. The company said it has a lineup of more than 2,000 independent fitness instructors, most of whom had been trying to go it alone on social media platforms like Instagram. Moxie offers them a fitness platform more tailor-fit for workouts and an array of licensed music for playlists. The company claims that 8,000 classes and 1 million class-minutes were completed last month.
Moxie’s CEO and founder, Jason Goldberg, a one-time Clinton White House employee, was infamous in tech circles for the spectacular implosion of his ecommerce website Fab, which spent $336 million in investor money before essentially shutting down in 2014.
However, the growth of Moxie online fitness platform shows that Goldberg still knows how to work a Rolodex of investors and has the trust of some deep-pocketed investors: Resolute Ventures lead this wave of investment. Also contributing were Bessemer Ventures, Greycroft Ventures, and noteworthy individuals, like Manik Gupta of Uber, Jay Parikh of Facebook, and Gokul Rajaram and Bruce Bell of Square.
Howard Morgan, Geoffrey Prentice and Allen Morgan were some of the backers of former Goldberg startups who signed on for Moxie last year, giving an initial $2.1 million in seed money as of last October.
With the new funding, Moxie said it plans to tweak parts of its fitness platform, curating selections of top Moxie classes for users, implementing new tools to help connect users to instructors, and adding the ability to preview classes before attending. It also is launching healthcare packages for its instructors and “Moxie Teams,” which will allow groups of instructors to form small businesses within the platform.
The continuing tide of investor capital into at-home fitness products and services shows that investors are betting hard that the workout-from-home craze will continue, even with the likelihood that COVID-19 concerns will diminish as a factor in planning routines as more people receive vaccines.
