Year: 2020

Startups that raised earlier in 2020 are finding success again before the year closes.

Today it’s Skyflow, a startup that TechCrunch covered in May when it announced a $7.5 million round. The company disclosed a new investment worth $17.5 million on Tuesday. The new round, a Series A, was led by Canvas Ventures. Foundation Capital, which led the company’s earlier Seed round, also took part in the deal.

Skyflow’s business offers customers the ability to store sensitive data in a zero-trust repository, or vault, that is accessible via an API. The company uses so-called polymorphic encryption to keep customer data secure, and to allow for granular access to data — more here, if you’re up for a white paper on the subject.

At the time of the company’s earlier Seed round, TechCrunch wrote that if its tech works as described, “Skyflow could help a host of companies that either can’t afford, or simply can’t be bothered, to properly protect your data that they have collected.”

It appears that the tech works, as the startup has landed a number of customers in the intervening months. After Skyflow’s product launched in July it secured its first customer in under two weeks, a seven-figure contract, according to co-founder and CEO Anshu Sharma. By the woefully out-of-date rule of thumb that a software startup is ready to raise a Series A once it reaches $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), Skyflow graduated to the next level of startup maturity rapidly. Although that initial contract may have had a longer time-horizon than a single year.

Given that its initial annual contract value (ACV) was attractive, and the company sports eight-figures worth of pipeline today according to its CEO, it’s not a surprise that Skyflow was able to raise more capital.

Canvas Ventures got interested even before that deal landed, pinging the startup about an investment after it announced its Seed round. Paul Hsiao, a general partner at Canvas, reached out and asked the company if it was looking to raise a Series A in June. The company balked at talking on more capital, asking Hsiao for some time to consider despite the offer coming with an attractive valuation (nine-figures, per Sharma).

After closing more customers, the company still had plenty of cash in the bank, but started talking to investors about taking on more capital anyway (always raise when you don’t need to is old venture advice for a reason). Some large funds wanted ownership stakes in the startup that failed to delight its founding team, the CEO said. In the end, the first investor to conviction won out, and Skyflow closed the deal with Canvas.

What’s ahead for Skyflow

The startup is honing its go-to-market motion. Sharma told TechCrunch that Skyflow has built out variations of its product to target market segments like finance, healthcare, and identity, areas that are rife with regulation and sensitive data. For Skyflow, the inherent radioactivity of those datasets is what is was built to manage, so it’s not afraid to wade in.

Skyflow is staffing up as well, especially to handle larger customers that require a sales force. A release from the company that TechCrunch viewed before publication added that Skyflow intends to hire more engineers, and continue its work more on offering vertical-specific product variants.

The startup also made a few key hires in recent months, including Paul Kopackim the former CMO of Heroku who joined recently, and Karthik Rajan, a former Salesforce engineering VP.

With good initial traction and more capital, Skyflow is in a good spot. Now it simply needs to keep the growth coming, and all the data it is securing safe. We’ll bother the company for new growth metrics when it’s been selling for a full year.

Buzzy face-swap video app Reface, which lends users celebrity ‘superpowers’ by turning their selfies into “eerily realistic” famous video clips at the tap of a button, has caught the attention of Andreessen Horowitz. The Silicon Valley venture firm leads a $5.5 million seed round in the deep tech entertainment startup, announced today.

Reface tells us its apps (iOS and Android) have been downloaded some 70 million times since it launched in January 2020 — up from 20M when we spoke to one of its (seven) co-founders back in August. It’s also attained ‘top five’ leading app status in around 100 countries, the US included — as well as bagging a ‘top app’ award in the annual Google Play best of. Quite the year, then.

That kind of viral growth clip has been turning heads all over the place. As well as nabbing a16z for its seed lead, Reface has pulled in funding from a number of prominent angel investors across the gaming, music, film/content creation and tech industries. 

This includes — from the gaming industry — Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell; and David Helgason, founder of Unity Technologies. From the world of music: Scooter Braun (known for managing top pop stars like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande); and Adam Leber, a manager to Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus, and an Uber investor. 

On the film/content creation side its angels include Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Peter Serafinowicz (via Deep Voodoo); Bryan Baum and Matt Kives, founder of K5 Global (whose clients have included the likes of Bruce Willis, Jesse Eisenberg and Eric Stonestreet); and Natalia Vodianova, a model, philanthropist, and actress.

Tech industry investors joining the round as angels are: Josh Elman (ex-investment partner at Greylock and on the boards of Medium, Operator, Musical.ly and Jelly); and Sriram Krishnan (investor and former product lead at Microsoft, Facebook, Snap and Twitter).

It’s the kind of broad-based excitement that can be generated when hot trend streams like ‘no code’ and viral social video get crossed. (At least if, like a rubbery face mask, we stretch the definition of ‘no code’ to cover — in Reface’s case — a push-button, AI tool for pro-style content creation; the ‘no code’ label typically refers to b2b tools that simplify app building but the common theme is supercharged accessibility.)

With such a sparkling portfolio of early stage backers Reface’s Ukrainian founders are surely proving the value of sticking with it where deep tech is concerned. As we reported back in the summer, three of the founders began working together almost a decade ago — honing their machine learning chops straight out of university. Their tenacity is now paying off in viral spades.

“The Reface team has taken their highly sophisticated, machine learning technology and transformed it into a consumer experience that is seamless to use and fun to share with your friends,” said Connie Chan, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz in a supporting statement on the funding.

“We’re just beginning to see the potential applications for their core technology across consumer, entertainment, and marketing experiences and the Reface team has the creativity and expertise to help shape that future,” she added.

“I believe that Reface has the potential to be the next-generation personalization platform that enables the gamification of movies, sports, music videos, and many other fields that people are passionate about,” added Supercell’s Paananen in another statement. “I’m excited to see the team grow Reface into a community that allows people to create active personal connections with artists and each other through content they love.” 

Reface says the seed funding will allow it to step on the growth gas. Including stepping up work on a tool that’s capable of detecting its own fakes, which it wants to build to shrink the risk of the tech being misused.

Earlier this year the startup told us the detection tech would be ready by fall so it’s evidently taking a bit longer than expected. But garnering viral growth for its celeb-video face-swaps may well have reconfigured its priorities a tad.

A previously slated fall launch of UGC video for face-swapping has also not yet fully materialized.

A community that’s currently fuelled by creating and sharing high production value celebrity video clips seems a very different kind of ‘eerie’ vs letting users loose on face-swapping themselves onto the body of their kid brother, say, or grandparent (not to mention the wider risks of not quality controlling the base material for face swaps). So taking time to get robust controls in place makes good business sense. As does focusing on stoking the viral boom with fresh celeb content by keeping content partners happy.

Asked about the delay, Reface told us UGC video has been “partly” launched at this point, since users can download their GIFs. “It’s still in beta as we’re testing and improving — detection system, moderation, communication with users — to make sure that content will not be misused,” it said, adding: “Regarding video, we have a bunch of creators who provide us with content directly. This way we can test all the UGC mechanics. We plan to launch the UGC option to the public by the end of Q1.” 

On the still-in-development detection tool, Reface said the plan is to launch it alongside UGC.

“We are training our models to maximize the detection quality,” it told us on that, adding that it hopes to have the tool finalized in April 2021.

Reface’s its overarching ambition is to build “the biggest platform of personalized content” — monetizing that by partnering with content holders and celebrities to offer head-turning “creative digital marketing solutions”.

Having a near captive audience for buzzy social content during the pandemic has clearly helped the mission, even as it’s boosted social rivals like Snap.

With so many bored kids stuck at home with their phones this year, there’s been an opportunity for growth across the board of social media. (And a16z is a backer of several other social plays, including audio-based social network Clubhouse, and — for kids — the Roblox social gaming platform, to name just two.)

In August 2020, Reface says it became viral and ranked number one in the U.S. AppStore — (briefly) surpassing TikTok and Instagram. Celebrities including Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Britney Spears, Joe Rogan, Chris Brown, Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa have all shared their refaced videos on social media this year, it also notes.

This year it’s inked partnerships with entertainment industry luminaries to promote new video launches, including Bieber, Cyrus and John Legend, as well as working with Amazon Prime to advertise the Borat movie premiere — racking up “millions” more shares and refaces.  

“Funding from Andreessen Horowitz will allow us to accelerate this growth, empower our team with new talents and improve technology, as we will continue work on a fake videos detection tool to guarantee responsible use of our AI technology,” co-founder Denis Dmitrenko added in a statement. 

Investors are buying into the shares of publicly traded Stitch Fix, the personal styling online clothes store, after it reported much better-than-expected earnings yesterday.

Shares of the company’s stock were up $16.86, or 47.05%, in early trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

For the company’s fiscal first quarter, which ends Oct. 31, Stitch Fix reported earnings of 9 cents a share. The company booked $490.4 million in revenue, a beat on analysts’ expectations that the company would see $481.2 million and lose 20 cents per share, according to Refinitiv data reported by CNBC.

For its fiscal first quarter ended Oct. 31, Stitch Fix reported earnings of 9 cents per share on revenue of $490.4 million, topping estimates for a loss of 20 cents per share on revenue of $481.2 million, according to Refinitiv data.

“In Q1, we delivered $490 million in net revenue, reflecting 10% year-over-year growth, and grew our active client count to nearly 3.8 million, reflecting 10% year-over-year growth,”said the company’s chief executive Katrina Lake . “We’re excited about the momentum in our business, confident in the future ahead, and we expect to deliver between 20% and 25% growth for the full year.”

Even as traditional retail suffers, due to government responses to curb the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, online retail is grabbing increasing shares of the market. Stitch Fix’s business is no exception.

“In a time period where many traditional brick and mortar retailers are still experiencing double-digit year over year revenue decreases in their most recent quarter, we delivered an increase of over 240,000 net active clients quarter over quarter, a return to double-digit, year-over-year active client growth, which we expect will increase further this fiscal year,” Lake wrote in a letter to shareholders.

The pandemic has been terrible for many industries, but the book industry has gotten a rare reprieve in an otherwise dismal past decade. Locked in homes and forced to socially distance from others, us humans have more time on our hands and more need to connect to characters than ever before.

That surge in interest in books has also led to a surge in interest from founders to rethink aspects of the reading experience. We profiled Salt Lake City-based BookClub a few weeks ago, which is designed to create author-led book clubs to share the reading experience with others. Other startups like serialized fiction platform Radish have raised massive new rounds as reading hits a new stride.

Before you even get to your book club though, how do you decide what to read and how do you find great books? (Outside, of course, the TechCrunch best books of 2020 as recommended by writers and VCs, which a source who declined to be named since they are writing this story told me is the only ‘best books of the year’ list you need to read).

That’s where BingeBooks comes in. BingeBooks wants to become the Netflix channel surfing platform for book lovers, designed to help you find the next great book based on what you have previously read.

That might seem like Goodreads, the dominant dinosaur in the space, but there is so much more here. BingeBooks was developed by Authors A.I., a service pioneered by novelists and machine learning experts to build an AI-driven editor called Marlowe that can evaluate a draft of a book and provide constructive feedback, such as around pacing, consistency of characters in the plot, and more.

The team at Authors A.I. realized that the same technology that can evaluate, analyze and interpret a book for authors can also help identify patterns between different books and make recommendations to readers as well.

BingeBooks launched just before the Thanksgiving holiday last month, and has titles from the big brand houses like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan as well as more than 7,000 independent titles.

“BingeBooks is really focused on reader discovery,” Alessandra Torre, president and co-founder of Authors A.I. said. “There really isn’t anything where it’s a safe, happy community where readers and authors can interact and that’s what we’re building.” She would know: Torre is the author of a number of bestsellers and 23 books across her writing career. She said that more than 120 authors were early stakeholders in the BingeBooks product.

Discovery is an issue for readers obviously, but it’s also an issue for authors. Authors, particularly independent authors without prodigious marketing budgets from the major presses, struggle to build a reading audience. Their work may well be the best in the world, but if you write it, they won’t necessarily come. BingeBooks wants to bridge the gap, and help both sides reach a better reading experience.

She’s joined by long-time author JD Lasica and Matthew Jockers, the writer of The Bestseller Code and a professor of English at Washington State University, where he specializes in computational analysis of text.

BingeBooks and Authors A.I. so far has been self-funded, and Lasica said that they are considering how to fundraise in the future now that their products are in the marketplace. Lasica said that crowdfunding might make more sense given the marketplace aspect of the company and their desire to engage more potential users onto the platform. The product is early, and the team hopes to expand its community features in early 2021.

Are we doomed to rewatch bad TikTok videos for the rest of our lives? Or can the kind of algorithms that have helped video services dominate our media culture be applied to reading? That’s what BingeBooks is asking, and hopefully, answering.

Tesla is striking while its share price — and ballooning market cap — is hot, filing today to sell $5 billion in shares after investors bid its equity to record levels.

The newly announced dilutive fundraising event is having a muted impact on its value, which is off 2.3% in pre-market trading as investors digested the news. Tesla’s market capitalization is $608 billion, meaning the stock sale is representing less than 1% of its value.

Tesla is working with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Barclays, BNP Paribas, BofA, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, SG Americas Securities, and Wells Fargo on the sale, according to a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The same filing notes that Tesla will sell these shares “from time to time and “at market prices.” Tesla said it will pay the banks a “commission of up to 0.25% of the aggregate gross proceeds” of the shares that they sell, or a maximum of $12.5 million.

Tesla has turned to the market before to access that capital. This is the second time in three months that the company has turned on the share sale spigot. In September, Tesla said it would sell $5 billion in shares from “time to time,” according to an SEC filing.

The American electric car company closed its third quarter with operating cash flow of $2.4 billion, and free cash flow just under $1.4 billion. Tesla wrapped the September quarter with a staggering $14.5 billion in cash and equivalents, implying that Tesla is more taking advantage of a market moment than working to shore up its current accounts. However, it should be noted that vast number of capitally intensive building projects that Tesla has underway, including factories in Berlin and near Austin. It has also seen its operating costs rise over time. In the third quarter, Tesla reported operating costs were $1.25 billion in the third quarter, a 34% pop from $930 million in the same quarter last year.

Tesla shares have a 52-week low of $67.02, according to Google Finance. They also have a 52-week high of $648.79, a price that was set yesterday. It’s a good time to take some cream from the top.

The two founders of Parrot Software, Roberto Cebrián and David Villarreal, first met in high school in Monterrey, Mexico. In the eleven years since , both have pursued successful careers in the tech industry and became family (they’re brothers-in-law).

Now, they’re starting a new business together leveraging Cebrián’s experience running a point-of-sale company and Villarreal’s time working first at Uber and then at the high-growth, scooter and bike rental startup, Grin.

Cebrían’s experience founding the point-of-sale company S3 Software laid the foundation for Parrot Software, and its point of sale service to manage restaurant operations. 

“Roberto has been in the industry for the past six or seven years,” said Villarreal. “And he was telling me that no one has been serving [restaurants] properly… Roberto pitched me the idea and I got super involved and decided to start the company.”

Like Toast in the U.S., Parrot  manages payments including online and payments and real-time ordering, along with integrations into services that can manage the back-end operations of a restaurant too, according to Villarreal. Those services include things like delivery software, accounting and loyalty systems.  

The company is already live in over 500 restaurants in Mexico and is used by chains including Cinnabon, Dairy Queen, Grupo Costeño, and Grupo Pangea.

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, the company has managed to attract a slew of high profile North American investors including Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures, Foundation Capital, Superhuman angel fund, Toby Spinoza, the vice president of DoorDash, and Ed Baker, a product lead at Uber.

Since its launch, the company has managed to land contracts in 10 cities, with the largest presence in Northeastern Mexico, around Monterrey, said Villarreal.

The market for restaurant management software is large and growing. It’s a big category that’s expected to reach $6.94 billion in sales worldwide by 2025, according to a reporter from Grand View Research.

Investors in the U.S. market certainly believe in the potential opportunity for a business like Toast. That company has raised nearly $1 billion in funding from firms like Bessemer Venture Partners, the private equity firm TPG, and Tiger Global Management.

Sanguina’s technology uses an algorithm to determine the amount of hemoglobin in the blood based on an examination and analysis of the coloration of the nail bed.

Created by Dr. Wilbur Lam, Erika Tyburski, and Rob Mannino, the company was born out of research conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.

“This non-invasive anemia detection tool is the only type of app-based system that has the potential to replace a common blood test,” said Dr. Lam, a clinical hematologist-bioengineer at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, and a faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech.

So far, Sanguina has raised over $4.2 million in funding from The Seed Lab, XRC Labs, as well as grants from The National Science Foundation and The National Institutes of Health, according to a statement.

 

Low code workflow has become all the rage among enterprise tech giants and SAP joined the group of companies offering simplified workflow creation today when it announced SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management, but it didn’t stop there.

It also announced SAP Ruum, a new departmental workflow tool and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its entry into the RPA space. The company made the announcements at SAP TechEd, its annual educational conference that has gone virtual this year due to the pandemic.

Let’s start with the Cloud Platform Workflow Management tool. It enables people with little or no coding skills to build operational workflows. It includes predefined workflows like employee onboarding and can be used in combination with Qualtrics, the company it bought for $8 billion 2018, to include experience data.

As SAP CTO Juergen Mueller told me, the company sees these types of activities in a much larger context. In the hiring example, that means it’s more than simply the act of being hired and getting started. “We like to think in end-to-end processes, and the one fitting into the employee onboarding would be recruit to retire. So it would start at talent acquisition,” he said.

Hiring and employee onboarding is the first part of the larger process, but there are other workflows that develop out of that throughout the employee’s time at the company. “Basically this is a collection of different workflow steps that are happening with some in parallel, some in sequence,” he said.

If there are experience questions involved like which benefits you want, you could add Qualtrics questionnaires to that part of the workflow. It’s designed to be very flexible. As with all of these kinds of tools, you can drag and drop components and do some basic configuration and you’re good to go. In reality, the more complex these become, the more expertise would be required, but this type of tool is designed with non-technical end users in mind as a starting point.

SAP Ruum is a simplified version of Cloud Platform Workflow Management designed for building departmental processes, and if there is an automation element involved where you want to let the machine take care of some mundane, repeatable tasks, then the RPA solution comes into play. The latter tends to be more complex and require more IT involvement, but it enables companies to build automation into workflows where the machine pushes data along through the workflow and does at least some of the work for you.

The company joins Salesforce, which announced Einstein Workflow Automation last week at Dreamforce and Google Workflows, the tool the company introduced in August. There are many others out there from companies large and small including Okta, Slack and Airtable, which all have no-code workflow tools built in.

The SAP TechEd conference has been going on for 24 years, and usually takes place in three separate venues — Barcelona, Las Vegas and Bangalore —  throughout the year. This year, the company is running a single-combined virtual conference for free to all comers. It runs for 48 hours straight starting today with a worldwide audience of over 60,000 sign-ups as of yesterday.

When Chi Xu left Magic Leap and returned to China, he had big ambitions. He believed China would have its own augmented and virtual reality giants, just as how the domestic smartphone industry birthed global leaders like Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi that rival Apple today.

Xu, now chief executive of Nreal, one of China’s highest-funded AR startups, is among a group of entrepreneurs uniquely positioned to build world-class hardware. The young generation is well-versed in both worlds, with work experience in Silicon Valley and often an Ivy League degree. They are also well-connected to capital and supply chains in China, which would support them through cycles of iteration to deliver powerful yet affordable products.

They might be proud of China’s technological progress, but they recognize supremacy doesn’t come overnight. More importantly, their firms often have intricate ties to the U.S., whether it’s for sourcing core parts or testing an early market.

Despite Beijing’s push for technological “self-reliance,” Chinese AR and VR companies still depend on imported chips like their smartphone counterparts. Because the industry is so young and no one really has a proven model for monetization, few investors and startups in China are willing to splurge on basic research.

But China has one important strength, said the founder of a Chinese AR startup who declined to be named: “In cutting-edge sectors, China has always lacked the talent to take things from ‘zero to one.’ However, China has the mass production and supply chain capabilities necessary for taking things from ‘one to n.'”

That was the case with smartphones. Once Apple demonstrated the technological and financial possibilities of handsets and gave rise to a production ecosystem around iPhones — in other words, catapulted the industry from zero to one — Chinese counterparts took cues from the American giant, made use of homegrown manufacturing resources and began delivering cheaper and even more powerful alternatives.

“I can’t imagine any Chinese corporations willing to invest in AR and VR as heavily as Microsoft, Apple or Facebook today,” said the founder, whose company sells headsets both in and outside China.

“On the contrary, China is good at playing catch-up by spending money on a race with a clear finish line. For example, chips. If there are already contestants in the area, so long as [Chinese firms] ramp up investment and follow the direction, they can deliver results.”

Chinese innovation

Although China, for the last decade, has been calling for more indigenous innovation, most of the advanced technologies found in AR and VR are still in the hands of foreign tech behemoths, several industry experts told TechCrunch. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips are used almost exclusively by serious players, from Facebook’s Oculus Quest in the U.S. to Pico and Nreal in China. Advanced optical solutions, on the other hand, mainly come from Japanese and Taiwanese firms.

That’s not to say Chinese companies don’t innovate. Prominent venture capitalist and AI expert Kai-Fu Lee famously argued in his book “AI Superpowers” that while the U.S. has an edge in fundamental research, China is stronger on implementation and commercial application.

“It’s true that the more experimental efforts are happening in the U.S., though I’m not sure if any of those are mature already,” Tony Zhao, founder and chief executive of real-time video API provider Agora and a veteran from WebEx, told TechCrunch. “For Chinese companies, there are more opportunities in [user experience].”

As AR and VR come of age, Zhao’s company is devising a toolkit to let developers and organizations stream and record AR content from devices. Use cases by China’s educators have particularly impressed Zhao. One client, for example, built a tool allowing a teacher to interact with a student through a virtual store, where the two speak English while they respectively act as the cashier and the customer.

“I think it’s very revolutionary because a lot of kids are going to be very excited to learn from those kinds of tools. It’s more like a real experience and would be more natural for students to learn to use a language instead of just know the grammar,” said Zhao.

“These solutions are already creative, but also very practical.”

The Chinese market offers other aspects that can keep investors excited. As Gavin Newton-Tanzer, president of Sunrise International, Asia producer of the “mixed reality” (XR) conference AWE, pointed out to TechCrunch:

“Many like to say that in the U.S., Magic Leap sucked all the air out of the room. They raised tons of money and as a result, few wanted to fund [other smart glass startups]. It’d be like funding a competitor to Didi in China or funding a competitor to Uber in the U.S. … Few felt like anyone else could meaningfully compete.”

Apple is launching its subscription fitness service, which is built mainly to complement Apple Watch, on December 14. Apple Fitness+ was first announced at Apple’s iPhone event in September, and will offer guided workouts on iPhone iPad and Apple TV, with live personal metrics delivered by the Apple Watch’s health metrics monitoring.

The fitness offering will cover 10 workout types at launch, including Hight Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), strength, yoga, dance, core, cycling, indoor walking and running, as well as rowing and cooldown. All cases are led by real trainers that Apple selected to record the interactive sessions, and they’re soundtracked from “today’s top artists” according to the company.

The interactive elements are fed mostly by Apple Watch stats, and will display heart rate metrics, countdown timers, and goal achievement ‘celebration’ graphics which display on the screen when a user fills up their Apple Watch Activity rings. This is a level of direct integration that’s similar to what Peloton achieves with its service, but without requiring a whole connected stationary bike or treadmill to work.

Other distinguishing features of the service include a recommendation engine that leverages data including previous Fitness+ courses taken by a user, as well as their Apple Watch Workout App data and other third-party health and fitness app integration information from Apple Health to recommend new workouts, trainers and exercise routines. Apple’s use of third-party integrations is particularly interesting here, since it’s using its platform advantage to inform its service personalization.

Apple is also committing to weekly updates of new content across all categories of workouts, with varying intensity and difficult levels. Anyone using Fitness+ can also share their workouts with friends and family, and compete with others directly in the app if they want.

There’s also an optional Apple Music integration, which allows users to favorite songs and playlists directly from workouts to add them to their library, but users won’t require Apple Music in order to access the music used for the training videos, which are divided into different selectable “styles” or genres.

Apple Fitness+ is available starting December 14, and will retail for $9.99 per month, or $79.99 when paid for a twelve month period up front. It’s also part of Apple’s new Apple One Premier service bundle alongside other services.

This is definitely a major competitive service launch to existing subscription fitness offerings, including Peloton. Apple’s bundle offering, along with its system’s flexibility and syncing across its devices, could make it an easier choice for beginners and those just getting started with more serious training, though the lack of live classes might be a downside for some.