NURVV is a London-based tech start-up with an ambitious goal of changing the way people view health and fitness through a new category of wearables. We launched our first product NURVV Run, a pair of smart insoles for running shoes, at CES in Las Vegas in 2020 and won the Best Wearable Tech Award!
Designed for all runners, NURVV Run offers a completely unique running insight as unlike other wrist-based wearables, it measures your running from your feet with two smart insoles that have 32 precision sensors capturing your every move that connects in turn to the NURVV Run app.
The 32 precision sensors each capture data from the feet at 1,000 times per second. NURVV Run offers real-time insights, straight from the point of action: the feet. NURVV Run is revolutionising how people run by accurately capturing the metrics that matter most, before using live in-app coaching to help them improve in a simple, easy-to-understand way, it’s a “24/7 Run Coach in your pocket”
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
I’m also the co-founder of Tech21, the protective phone case company. At Tech21 we created the world’s first scientifically proven impact protection phone case. We have collaborated with Apple for over a decade and have sold 100’s of millions of phone cases during this period.
During a research project for Tech21 at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, we developed one of the worlds most advanced drop machines which could accurately measure the huge impact forces that Tech21 case can with stand well above any other cases in the global market, we then saw the opportunity to transfer this advanced technology to wearables, providing us with the ability to measure running data from the most logical body point, the feet.
We started off our research and development journey five years ago, and developed product with leading biomechanical experts from the leading sports-science universities in the UK.
We have started with the hardest sport first, which is running. For running, you must process at speed the data from each foot to allow our unique biomechanical driven sensor system to coach the user in real-time to run stronger, faster, and most importantly without injury. Injury is one of the biggest factors that prevents people from running and our unique system can capture the changes in your running ability to identify an injury before you know you have one!
We believe we are the first wearable product that not only helps users improve their performance but also gives them a view of their running health helping them stay injury free, a real outdoor connected fitness wearable as fitness has never been so important as we are coming out of COVID as Gartner states the market is set to be worth £40B ($80B USD) over the coming years.
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How has the company evolved during the pandemic?
The pandemic has made people across the world more aware of the urgent need for us all to make sure that health & Fitness becomes a bigger part of our daily life. NURVV has been able to offer runners of all levels a 24/7 personalised run coach on how to run stronger, further, and most importantly without injury.
What can we hope to see from NURVV in the future?
Since our launch in late 2020 we have generated data on over 100 million foot-strikes and over 125,000km run that’s 3 x around the World, allowing us to build what is already the world’s largest database of detailed running foot techniques.
Currently, we are doing a Series B investment round for $25m USD, and our Series A investor Hiro will follow this round. The investment will allow us to use the unique knowledge we have developed in NURVV Run to start work on an exciting road map of products such as NURVV Walk, NURVV Wellbeing and NURVV Cycle and also due to the accuracy of the data we can capture at the foot. We can use our technology platform in the health and Fitness market sector, for use in monitoring the elderly, police, military, first responders and healthcare where we believe that we can help with monitoring and rehabilitation of diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s and even people who have suffered strokes or spinal cord injuries.
By 2025, we want to be able to provide over 10 million runners with real time, injury-preventing data, and coaching through NURVV’s technology. We predict that our technology and platform will be integrated into all types of sports shoes within the next 2-3 years.
