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Fitnesskeeper Inc. is trading in its bootstraps, hoping more expensive footwear paid for with venture capital will help the startup run faster. The Boston-based iPhone app developer has taken $400,000 in a seed-stage investment. It’s the first dime of outside capital for Fitnesskeeper, which had not raised friends and family or angel investment prior to the round.
The company makes a mobile application called Runkeeper, available on Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq: APPL) iPhone, designed to track runners’ performance using the phone’s built-in GPS capability.
The funds come from Cambridge-based venture investor LaunchCapital, and angel investors including former Compete.com CEO Don McLagan, BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter and Viewlogic founder Will Herman. With the investment, the four-person company plans to add two or three staff members in engineering and sales, with the aim to expand onto other mobile devices and offer a wider range of services available for one-time or subscription fees to users on its freemium platform.
CEO Jason Jacobs, who founded the company last June, said Runkeeper has upwards of 800,000 downloads, including both its free, ad-supported version, and an ad-free version available for a one-time fee of $10.
“The download revenue, although it’s been almost 100 percent of our revenues, that’s not our business model,” Jacobs said. “That’s not how this is going to scale and get really big. What the downloads have been is our seed funding through where we are now.”
Prior to taking venture funding, Fitnesskeeper had become cash-flow positive, Jacobs said. He declined to discuss revenue or say how many users had downloaded the paid version of the Runkeeper app.
The first version of the application was built by Raizlabs Inc., an iPhone development shop based in Brookline.
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