YUR, a VR fitness company, today announced it’s secured $1.1 million in pre-seed funding, something the company says will help them to further use VR to address what it considers a ‘worldwide epidemic of sedentary behavior’.
The pre-seed investment round was led by The Venture Reality Fund and BoostVC. A San Francisco-based startup, YUR (pronounced “why you are,”) was founded in early 2019 by Cix Liv and Dilan Shah.
Having launched its pilot program on PC VR earlier this year, YUR is now officially making its software available on Oculus Quest.
The plug-in tracks calories burned while in any VR game or app while using Quest, and also extends to a mobile app that syncs to Apple Health and Google Fit.
You won’t find YUR on the Oculus Store though, at least not yet. Since it provides an overlay and works in the background while other apps are running, for now the software is only available through Sidequest, the unofficial app store that allows you to side-load unofficially supported games and apps.
“We are building YUR to be the Peloton of the future by making fitness a game,” said Cix Liv, co-founder and CEO of YUR. “Gaming and fitness have always been our biggest passions, and we believe there’s a growing community of people who want to combine these two passions as well.”
In addition to calorie-counting and fitness app integration, YUR is setting its sights on some pretty ambitious future usecases. The company says that, in the future, not only do they want their software tell how a player is moving in games, but to one day be able to provide specific health and fitness recommendations via an AI assistant—of course, all of it in the name of fun.