Why we invested in Terra, an API for fitness and health
The marketplace is being inundated with health and wellness companies that need support for an ever growing number of connected devices. App developers want to be able to personalize user experiences, facilitate engagement, and monitor the results. But that can be difficult to achieve when data is siloed across different platforms.
That’s where Terra fits in. Terra is making it easier for apps to aggregate data from fitness and wellness devices through a single API, allowing consumers to access all of their personal information in one place.
We think Terra is well-positioned to grow quickly. For that reason, we recently joined with General Catalyst, VentureSouq, Next Ventures, Pioneer Fund and angel investors – such as James Meekings, Ilkai Gundogan, and Dele Ali – in a $2.8 million seed round to help the company scale. Gundogan and Ali, by the way, are professional footballers, well-known among European soccer fans. Terra’s founders also participated in the January 2021 Y-Combinator W21 batch in San Francisco earlier this year.
Terra has developed an API that makes it easy to access fitness and wellness data – such as daily activity and biomarkers – using HTTP requests. The API is organized around REST and accepts form-encoded request bodies, returns JSON-encoded responses, and uses standard HTTP response codes, authentication, and verbs. Terra is also developing a version of the API that facilitates real-time access to health-related data.
We believe that Terra has the potential to disrupt the fitness app space much in the same way that Plaid’s fintech effect has enabled consumers to gain access to all their financial account data in one place. Terra facilitates the development of apps and services that include data from sources such as Samsung, Apple, Peloton, Fitbit and Garmin.
Longer term, everything from digital wearables and sensor data to DNA and food intake information can be aggregated. This information can be used for more than just consumer technology devices. For example, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies could use this information to better understand health trends. The key is to reduce the friction in adopting the tools that developers use to create, collect, and analyze the data.
When it comes to investing, we’re just as interested in the people as in technology. After all, the sum of an entrepreneur’s past experience is a good indicator of how well they will do in the future.
In the case of Terra, the co-founders are Kyriakos Eleftheriou and Raouf Yousfi, who met in business school at the Imperial College in London. Eleftheriou, who served in the special forces in Cyprus before going into business, is a serial entrepreneur. Yousfi also has entrepreneurial experience, having founded other businesses in the past. Moreover, he was a competitive swimmer, and has a passion for fitness. The two entrepreneurs were also recently featured on the Forbes Magazine “30 Under 30” Europe 2021 list.
The wearable technology market is growing at 15% a year and is expected to top $51.6 billion by 2022. We think Terra’s platform-agnostic API is just what the health and fitness market needs.
Caroline Rehfuss is an Investor at Samsung Next