Welltory, a New York based digital health startup working on a stress & energy management app, has raised $1 million in seed funding from business angels. The company plans to utilize the funding from the seed round to launch the next version of their app.
Founded in 2014 by co-founders Alexander Lyskovsky, Jane Smorodnikova and Pavel Pravdin, Welltory’s stress and energy management app let users see how lifestyle changes – morning meditation, working from home, or a diet change – affect their stress & energy levels. People can optimize their lifestyles by keeping changes that work and discarding ones that don’t.
Available on iOS and Android, Welltory applies the same PPG technology found in most pulse oximeters, the app uses the phone’s camera to illuminate blood vessels in a user’s index finger and measure heart rate variability (HRV). Welltory then uses heart rate variability algorithms to assess the state of the autonomic nervous system – the body’s stress and recovery regulation center.
This is how stress & energy levels are calculated. It’s the same technique used by professional athletes, researchers, and healthcare specialists to track health and recovery. For example, the hockey team Red Wings relies on HRV analysis to track training and recovery with Firstbeat. Similarly, NBA players like DeAndre Jordan and Matthew Dellavedova wear HRV-based WHOOPs during games.
The HRV measurements are available for free for any user using the app. Welltory also features a paid version includes a Quantified Self Dashboard, which lets users collect data about their lifestyles and see how different aspects of their lives affect their stress, energy, and productivity levels.
Welltory can be synced with fitness trackers and Fitbits, Apple Health, and Google Fit to collect data about factors like sleep, nutrition, and physical activity. It also supports RescueTime (a productivity tracker), home weather stations that track your surroundings, and more. Over time, the Dashboard starts to generate charts that show correlations. Users can see if walking an extra mile a day helps keep their stress levels down, check how morning meditation sessions affect their productivity, and find out if they have a weather dependency.
“Our goal was to give people a tool that makes sense and shows what all this Quantified Self data means. They can see how their activity influences their stress, how many hours of sleep they need to recover properly, and what lifestyle habits influence their productivity at work.Stress & energy measurements is the key that connects the dots of your lifestyle data and makes it easy to get real insights,” said Jane Smorodnikova, co-founder of Welltory.
To help users get more value from the data, Welltory also provides built-in explanations and videos about how the brain and body work, tasks that teach users how to run lifestyle experiments based on stress & energy data, and in-app chat support with wellness and quantified self specialists.
To date, Welltory currently has 142,000 + users and 1M+ heart rate variability measurements – the largest database of HRV measurements coupled with lifestyle & productivity data. The project’s monthly growth rate amounts to 25-30% in paying users and revenue coming from paid subscriptions.
The company plans to reach 400,000+ installs before the end of this year world wide. Welltory’s focus is to add more data insights and educational content, creating a gamified experience to help hardworking adults find optimal work and sleep schedules, get rid of bad habits, and figure out which workout & relaxation techniques boost their productivity, lower stress, and increase energy levels.
