Cadoo gets $1.5M to gamify fitness with betting challenges
Summary
"Financial incentives is an intense motivator, and 90% of users who sign up for Cadoo challenges reach their fitness goals. Commenting on the seed raise in a statement, Apollo VCs Altman brothers added: “Cadoo makes it easy to motivate users to stay active with financial incentives. We believe the motivation industry that Cadoo is pioneering will be an important digital money use-case.” Before the seed round, Cadoo says it had raised $350,000 via an angel round from Tim Parsa’s Cloud Money Ventures Angel Syndicate, Wintech Ventures, and Daniel Grosss Pioneer. Of course gamification of health is nothing new -- given the data-fuelled quantification and goal-based motivation thats been going on around fitness for years, fuelled by wearables that make it trivially easy to track steps, distances, calories burned etc. But injecting money into the mix adds another competitive layer that may be helpful for motivating a certain type of person to get or stay fit.