Strove, founded in 2020 by Chris Bruchhausen in collaboration with venture builder The Delta, is an activity-based mobile rewards program that enables businesses to urge their staff to live a healthy and active lifestyle, combating inactivity, burnout, and chronic stress.
The platform incentivizes employees to be their best selves through activity tracking and gamification, with prizes from over a dozen partner brands including Old Khaki, Poetry, Bootlegger Coffee, Mugg & Bean, Dis-Chem, Vida e Caffè, and Engen.
Strove secured a ZAR4 million (US$277,000) seed fundraising round led by Launch Africa Ventures in July of last year to help it on its way to expanding to the UK, which it has already done. It is currently aiming for further European expansion. But how exactly does it work?
Employees may integrate activity tracking wearables and applications like Apple Health, Google Fit, Strava, and Fitbit with their Strove profile to improve their physical well-being. They can then sync any type of action, such as a run or cycle, and get points for each one.
“The points are calculated by our scoring system, which considers a variety of parameters like as heart rate, calories, distance, duration, and employee age and gives points accordingly.” “Those points can then be spent on vouchers at any of our merchant partners, which include Bootleggers, Vida, PicknPay, and Dis-Chem,” Bruchhausen told Disrupt Africa.
“We’re also incorporating a social component into the product.” We already have company leaderboards that rank the highest performers in each organization across all activity kinds – everything from the number of meditation minutes finished, the number of steps taken, the distance traveled… We also separate the leaderboards by departments to create some competitiveness amongst the various departments of a company.
Strove, on the other hand, pays employees for syncing meditation practices via their Apple Health or Google Fit connection, which they have incorporated.
“We also have a client web application that we make available to key stakeholders at each of our clients.” The web application’s goal is to provide these stakeholders with aggregated insights regarding the product’s usage and the overall health of their organization over time. They can also utilize the web tool to onboard and de-board people, as well as allocate them to teams or departments,” Bruchhausen explained.
So, a bigger HR component, and Strove does have a broad aim to become a global employee health and wellbeing application.
“Virtual mental health assistance and tele-medicine, to name a few of the bigger overall product roadmap aspects,” Bruchhausen stated.
International expansion is another ambition, and it has already begun as a result of the fundraising round. Strove has many financial services and technology organizations on board as clients in South Africa, according to Bruchhausen, and the startup is working with clients in the UK as of February.
“We want to launch a product in the European market within the next two months,” he stated.
Strove charges a per employee onboarded per month subscription fee, billed to the company, and has seen decent revenue growth.