5Y News｜Keep Closes $360 Million Series F Round, 5Y Capital Continues Backing
Exercise is just a Keep moment.
On January 11, 2021, Chinese fitness tech company Keep announced the completion of its $360 million Series F funding round. The round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund, with Hillhouse Capital and Coatue Management joining as new investors. Existing shareholders GGV Capital, Tencent, 5Y Capital, Jeneration Capital, and BAI Capital also added to their positions. Following this round, Keep further cemented its leading position in the fitness industry and became a sports tech unicorn commanding attention from international capital markets.
5Y Capital led Keep's Series C in 2016 and continued to participate in its Series D, E, and F rounds.
Qin Liu, founding partner of 5Y Capital, said: "China is entering a comprehensive era of consumption upgrade. For young people, spiritual attributes are increasingly surpassing functional attributes as the basis for consumption choices. Fitness is precisely such an example — it is by no means merely about physical exercise; it is a spiritual totem of the Chinese youth lifestyle.
Keep was born from a chubby guy named Ning Wang who got fed up and decided to lose weight. And Keep has grown to its current scale because this entrepreneur, Ning Wang, has continuously evolved through self-awakening. This is the right entrepreneur, at the right time, doing the right thing. I believe Keep will continue to surprise us and grow into a sports brand for the digital age."
From left: Yuan Ye, partner at 5Y Capital; Ning Wang, founder and CEO of Keep; Qin Liu, founding partner of 5Y Capital. Photo taken during the 5Y Capital CEO Summit.
01
Premium content builds scale effects, data algorithms become growth engine, already the #1 brand for home fitness
In 2020, Keep focused on the home fitness scenario, offering a more comprehensive one-stop fitness solution to provide general users with an intelligent at-home exercise experience. To date, over 300 million users have accessed home fitness services through Keep.
To meet users' diverse fitness needs, Keep has continued to strengthen its online content moat. Beyond more than 1,200 self-developed courses, the company brought in superstar fitness creators like Pamela Reif and Pamela Ng, and made significant breakthroughs in brand licensing by acquiring content IP from overseas including Zumba and Les Mills — further enriching the diversity of its fitness content.
Additionally, Keep leverages its technology and algorithm advantages to provide membership value-added services such as intelligent training plans for users with specific physique goals. To date, Keep's membership has surpassed 10 million, becoming a new commercial growth engine.
While continuously expanding and enriching its online content services, Keep has also been optimizing its product experience across the full spectrum of exercise scenarios — "eating, wearing, using, and training." Its flagship 2020 product for home fitness, the Keep intelligent spinning bike, integrates hardware, content, data, coaches, and user communities. With more dynamic content formats and highly interactive live coaches as the connective tissue, it offers general users an immersive home cycling and fat-burning party. The bike now sees over 3 weekly course uses per user on average, with significantly improved user lifecycle metrics that continue to rise rapidly. As product recognition and sales have exploded, the bike also claimed absolute first place in transaction volume among comparable products on Tmall during the Double 11 shopping festival.
In 2021, Keep will bring more intelligent fitness products for home scenarios, allowing users to experience more dynamic content and strong interactivity with live coaches, continuing to provide quality fitness experiences for Chinese families. Additionally, Keep is iterating and upgrading its smart hardware including treadmills and fitness bands, continuously optimizing its small exercise equipment categories, and launching health foods better suited to the "Chinese stomach" — gaining industry and public recognition through more user-tailored product services. To date, Keep's annual sales of fitness consumer products have achieved 100% year-over-year growth, making it an emerging domestic sports brand.
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From follow-along content fitness to coach-led live fitness, from fitness service provider to platform operator, providing more support to the fitness industry
With the cultivation of live coaches, the onboarding of PUGC content creators, and steady user growth, Keep is gradually evolving into a fitness platform.
Currently, Keep has built a live interactive team of nearly 100 people encompassing course designers, live coaches, and talent operations. For this entirely new profession of live coach, Keep has launched long-term training programs and established an integrated career development path, fully deploying platform resources to build the highest-quality live coach team. Over six months of live business development, the live coach team has cumulatively attracted millions of followers, and the commercial value of live coaches is beginning to show. Going forward, even greater resources will be invested in the long-term cultivation and development of coaches, which will better activate the platform and empower the entire fitness industry.
Leveraging its advantage of over 300 million vertical fitness users, Keep continues to attract top fitness content creators to its platform. Moving forward, it will better provide creators with comprehensive services including data analytics, content training, and traffic support — thereby incentivizing sustained production of premium content and forming a positive cycle for the platform. To date, thousands of creators including course designers and community content creators have joined Keep.
Following this new funding round, Keep will continue to focus on the home scenario, deeply exploring general users' fitness needs, improving the fitness service experience, providing intelligent fitness services for every family, while also offering more services and support to practitioners across the fitness industry — together enabling every user to enjoy the health and happiness that exercise brings. We will also continue to uphold our mission of "Make the World Move," getting more people to participate in sports, continuously exercising our power as a national sports brand, and promoting fitness for all.
5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately $3 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe that if the "crazy" you in others' eyes starts to be believed in, the world becomes a better place.
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