90% of Americans who exercise regularly say they will continue at-home workouts even after gyms fully reopen. The convenience of rolling out of bed combined with a growing number of options to exercise at home has led consumers to splurge on sophisticated at-home fitness equipment. Ergatta provides an at-home connected rowing machine and subscription service that incorporates interactive gaming elements to provide a full-body workout. From a 17.3-inch interactive screen, rowers can choose a personalized experience based on their goals. The Ergatta Rower, which retails at $1,999 with an additional $29/month subscription fee, satisfies the needs of those who are interested in building a results-driven workout routine that’s competitive without having to participate in classes.
AlleyWatch caught up with Cofounder and CEO Tom Aulet to learn more about the experience of launching at the onset of the pandemic, the company’s impressive traction, latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $35M, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Ergatta raised $30M in Series A funding. Advance Venture Partners led the round, joined by Greycroft, Fifth Wall, Gaingels, and Hans Tung.
Tell us about the product or service that Ergatta offers.
The Ergatta Rower is the first product to successfully combine home cardio equipment and interactive gaming to deliver a competitive, motivating, and full-body fitness experience for mainstream consumers. Our elegant rower is handmade from sustainably sourced cherrywood in the USA and is designed to look like furniture, store compactly and move easily. Ergatta’s content experience uses competition, games, and real-time feedback to make workouts fly by and drive habit-forming behavior over time. Our active intelligence adapts each workout to your fitness level and makes sure all programming and competition are personalized to you.
What inspired the start of Ergatta?
I created Ergatta with my former colleagues Alessandra Gotbaum and Prasanna Swaminathan, who shared a similar desire to start a company and lead a more entrepreneurial lifestyle. The concept for Ergatta was ultimately inspired by a desire for a more self-directed workout option, rooted in competition, achievement, and real progress. I knew the positive impact regular fitness had on both my mental and physical health but struggled to find an option that captured my attention. The vast majority of fitness experiences were oriented around an instructor-led, follow-along style fitness class, but that approach does not work for all consumers. After significant research, we discovered that the class experience doesn’t resonate with roughly half of the fitness market and we set out to build a new experience specifically for these people.
How is Ergatta different?
Most importantly, Ergatta is different by offering game-based connected fitness rather than the class-based variety. By leveraging key principles of gamification, personalization, and real-time performance feedback, Ergatta’s content platform delivers workouts that feel like playing a sport. The brand’s flagship product, the Ergatta Rower, pairs this tech-driven content approach with a handcrafted, premium rowing machine that is built from cherry wood in Rhode Island and designed to fit seamlessly into members’ living rooms. Ergatta’s proprietary dynamic calibration personalizes the experience for each individual, automatically adjusting to keep workouts challenging as the user improves over time.
What market does Ergatta target and how big is it?
Target customers for Ergatta are busy, fitness-oriented adults who don’t connect with fitness classes. They tend to be more competitive, introverted, and they skew male. Our customers spend money and time on fitness, as they feel it provides meaningful benefits for both their physical and mental health. They are looking for an everyday at-home solution that fits into their life, from both a content and design perspective, helping them to stay motivated and build a sustainable workout routine. This consumer profile maps to tens of millions of households in top fitness markets with the money, interest, and psychographic fit for our product.
What’s your business model?
DTC.
How has COVID-19 impacted the business??
Ergatta was in development long before COVID-19, but the brand was officially launched during the early days of the pandemic (March 24th, 2020). While fitness was already trending towards in-home workouts, Covid-19 certainly accelerated that transition, and as more customers were actively searching for at-home fitness equipment, they were able to discover Ergatta and join our community early on. COVID-19 also complicated and slowed down our supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics operations.
What was the funding process like?
This raise was actually extremely quick. We had had significant inbound interest and once we were ready to raise, we signed a term sheet in a couple of weeks.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The round came together relatively quickly and easily, but I would say the biggest challenge was sizing the addressable market for rowing machines. As those before us have shown, a connected cardio machine is a completely different product from an analog cardio machine so the markets are not comparable, but there were some folks who had the perception that rowing was niche and that can be hard to break.
The round came together relatively quickly and easily, but I would say the biggest challenge was sizing the addressable market for rowing machines. As those before us have shown, a connected cardio machine is a completely different product from an analog cardio machine so the markets are not comparable, but there were some folks who had the perception that rowing was niche and that can be hard to break.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Growth trajectory, unit economics, the fact that we’re attacking a massive and immature market, and historical capital efficiency.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We plan to 2-3x our membership, retain those members at a high rate, and drive increased product usage by our members through product enhancements and improved community engagement.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Be rigorous about how you use the capital you do have. Stay completely focused on a targeted strategy and don’t get distracted along the way.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’ll increase our headcount, scale operations, and increase marketing. What this will mean for our members is accelerated improvement and evolution of our content experience, smoother operations and shorter shipping timelines, and a growing user base on the platform.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC
Forma Pasta Factory in Greenpoint.
