The race is on to create a new class of consumer-driven health companies. One of the most popular health and fitness apps on the iPhone, RunKeeper, is started tackling by making it easy for people to measure their exercise, but now it is busy building out an entire “Health Graph” so that all sorts of health data can plug into its service.
The Boston-based company raised $10 million in a Series B financing, led by Spark Capital. Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures also participated, along with existing investor OATV. The company has 14 employees and is looking to hire more.
RunKeeper is gunning to become the Facebook of Fitness by tying together data from all sorts of fitness apps and services. Since it opened up its Health Graph API in June, 40 services are no integrated. Third party data sharing is still relatively small, but it is doubling every month.
As Rip wrote in June:
But what is this “Health Graph”, exactly? RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs wants you to “imagine a system that can identify correlations between a user’s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more”, that has the sole purpose of delivering an “ecosystem of health and fitness apps, websites, and sensor devices that really work, based on a user’s own historical health and fitness data”.
If it can assemble all your fitness and health data and deliver it to you in its dashboard, RunKeeper has a shot at spreading well beyond fitness buffs to anyone who wants to take control of their health.