Business Model Innovation in Digital Health: Bob Allison, Co-Founder of PEAR Health Labs (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is also very interesting from a technology entrepreneur’s point of view. Let’s say you focus on one of these specific use cases and you want to build a full-stack product to bring to market. That is a very dangerous path because it’s very expensive.

Very often, the people who have the technical expertise don’t have the B2C marketing expertise. Going with the credibility and the existing brand and feeding your technology expertise into the hands of people who do have that marketing expertise and brand presence is a very interesting way to go to market.

Bob Allison: We consider that our point of influence. We try to find partners that are going to influence users because of their credibility. Our job is to deliver an incredible, highly-engaging experience for them. In the fitness app world, the engagement rates are pretty low. It’s hard for these folks to keep reattracting users all the time.

We can’t do both the technology stack and direct-to-consumer. You’re in tune with what we’ve been trying to do. We do a lot of stuff with the military. The military has its own reasons for wanting people to be fit. We built a product for them that’s branded their stuff. They push it out to their people. We don’t have to market to that group.

As time has gone on, we have been able to build products that are for the broader market like the population healthcare markets where employers care about their employees getting good exercise and getting a good amount of wellness content. They want it to be an integrated experience. They’re becoming less comfortable around not getting any data about that. They’d like to know how engaged is their workforce in being healthy. They look at folks like us to build things for them that they can add their magic sauce to.

Sramana Mitra: You are going after people who are already in that market like the employee wellness market.

Bob Allison: Yes, all of the people in the wellness market- WelTalk, Amwell, Limeade.

Sramana Mitra: How has this been? You launched this in 2017, you said?

Bob Allison: We got into the platform business in 2017. We had about a million dollars in revenue in 2017. In 2019, we started to get a bit more traction. We did about $3 million in 2021. We grew 300% in 2022. We’ll grow 300% in 2023. It’s finally starting to get traction. We’ve made four acquisitions. We’ve invested a lot of money. All of it is strategic and not traditional or private equity funds.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the acquisitions. What have you acquired and why?

Bob Allison: As part of building that platform, one of the things that we identified that was going to be incredibly important is physiological AI. A simple way for me to describe it is, we want to make recommendations to people about the best exercises that would deliver the best outcome given all of the dynamics of their lifetime limitations, ambulatory issues, and age issues.

We wanted to make content smart and we wanted to make sure that people were not exercising with just one modality. We really wanted to deliver physicality recommendations to people that would make them healthier. To do that, we needed to have some amount of intelligence around that.

We happened to run into a company out of New Zealand called Performance Lab that was doing work with Intel in their wearables group. They were doing dynamic coaching and physiological training using biometric data as the primary input and then using physiological science to deliver that. That was our first acquisition. We would consider ourselves good at audio-based delivery of coaching. We wanted an engine or brain behind that. We merged together in 2019.

Then another piece of our acquisition was, we wanted to understand the power of fluidity of body movement. We acquired a company called Pilates Metrics, which was a yoga and pilates science movement company up in the Bay Area. They were teaching Pilates teachers how to teach better in terms of developing new workouts for teachers. We acquired Pilates Metrics to help us with body movement.

Then we acquired a company that was in the TV delivery side of the business based out of Virginia. We acquired that and the idea there was to deliver our content directly to TVs that were in workout areas. They were a visualization company. We acquired them.

The acquisition that was finally extraordinarily influential in our strategy was a well-known app called Aaptiv based out of New York.

Those four are what make up PEAR. As a recognition that we were moving towards that population health side, we changed our name from PEAR Sports to PEAR Health Labs in 2022.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Business Model Innovation in Digital Health: Bob Allison, Co-Founder of PEAR Health Labs
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