Growl is a company that recently launched out of stealth and built a gamified at-home fitness experience powered by AI and gaming tech. Today, the company announced a Kickstarter campaign for interested users to reserve a Growl at a discounted price. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Growl co-founder and CEO Léo Desrumaux to learn more about the company.
Léo Desrumaux’s Background
What is Léo Desrumaux’s background? Desrumaux said:
“Moving to the US from France at 16 was difficult – I was a troubled teen who didn’t know a word of English and needed to acclimate to a new culture. Combat sports like wrestling, MMA, and boxing became a refuge for me and initially served as a way to immerse myself into American culture, but it became much more than an outlet to de-stress.”
“I found myself through combat sports and boxing. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t made out of glass – that I could take a punch but also hit back. I discovered my potential and, more importantly, learned the tools to execute on that potential—a very powerful gift to give to a young person. There’s a saying, ‘Once you’ve boxed, everything else in life is easy.’ That’s the power boxing gave me; and the power I needed to succeed.”
“I continued combat sports in my spare time outside of university and business school before starting my career in mergers & acquisitions and eventually working for a private equity firm with a large VC fund, which is where I was first introduced to connected fitness.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Desrumaux shared:
“Wrestling, MMA, and boxing helped me find myself as a teen and learn perseverance, hard work, and determination. As I grew up, I continued to pursue combat sports as a hobby and apply those lessons to my career.”
“Connected fitness started gaining more attention during my time working at Cathay Capital, a private equity firm that also had a significant VC fund. This is where I first heard of connected fitness and the potential it had to make exercise more accessible & powerful to a wide audience. As someone who regularly boxes, I quickly realized that there wasn’t a connected fitness product available that realized the full potential of boxing for everyone at home boxing. Thinking back on the impact combat sports have on me personally, I saw potential to create GROWL with the goal of bringing the power of boxing to everyone in their homes, offering people the same opportunity to build confidence, resilience, and unwavering focus in and out of their fitness journeys.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Desrumaux reflected:
“One of the most defining memories of the company was the very first time we were able to have our vision for the product come to life.”
“It was the very first time we assembled the proof of concept. We were assembling an aluminum steel gauge that would hold the projection unit at the precise location where we needed it to be, combined with the punching bag we designed and put together ourselves. You could see the image being projected on the back and interact with it – it wasn’t ready for an actual punch just yet, but we could get close enough short of touching the bag to get a real feel for the experience. Seeing it work for the very first time and work very well as the coach moved from left to right throwing combinations gave us that realization that we were onto something. That was a Friday, and I know this by heart because on Monday, I quit my job.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Desrumaux explained:
“We built GROWL with the intent of building a fitness experience that keeps everyone in the family engaged and inspires them to gain confidence and motivation in addition to experiencing health benefits. From gamified content to a variety of exercise modalities users can try out either alone or with a friend, our core product features ensure adaptability for every mood, ambition, fitness goal, skill level, and age:
— We turn the boxing bag into a life-sized interactive coach that gives users personalized guidance and motivation, similar to having a personal trainer right by their side
— Using multi-camera 3D motion and edge-computing, we’re able to provide real-time, personalized insights to sharpen users’ form and technique with every round
— Electrifying content developed in Unreal Engine creates an immersive gaming experience for users to lock in as they compete and fight in their workouts
— Replicating the resistance of a traditional heavy bag enables users to harness the raw power of boxing for a full-body, high-intensity cardio and strength workout every time.
— Our workouts are designed for everyone ages 10 and up, making it easier for kids, teens, and adults to train either solo or side-by-side
— Offering a variety of workouts – yoga, flexibility, technical boxing, strength training – encourages users to discover new ways to stay active while making sure they get the most out of our product
— The bag’s wall-mounted design makes it easy to put this in any room of the house with minimal disruption to your day-to-day life.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Desrumaux and the team faced in building the company? Desrumaux acknowledged:
“Any founder of a tech company, consumer or hardware, will face serious challenges. Founders working on products that combine the two face a much more difficult set of challenges – the expectations are a lot higher because the difficulty of building a hardware product is more complex than building and iterating on pure software. Still, there’s beauty in serving consumers at such a large scale, and building a powerful, vertically integrated hardware experience – just look at Tesla and Apple, for instance.”
“But one of the most difficult experiences for us was getting Growl off the ground – building the company and raising money at a time when a lot of people thought Peloton was about to go bankrupt and connected fitness was losing steam.”
“Peloton was even doing super well before the company went through the roof during the pandemic, but its ambitions overshadowed its resources once the pandemic effects subsided. They were going full steam ahead with little room to adapt with changes in a post-pandemic world. At that point, it’s difficult to course correct, and there was a genuine risk of bankruptcy. Luckily for us, the connected fitness industry, and the 7 million people they serve, that didn’t happen because the team was not only able to course correct, but because they built such a powerful product and experience used daily by their userbase.”
“This goes to show that the hardest part for us was trying to raise in this environment, but we learned that even though Peloton’s trajectory blew everything out of proportion, connected fitness is serving the needs of millions of people, keeping them happy and healthy with a powerful, accessible fitness experience for people in the comfort of their own home. Peloton even deserves more credit because if you speak to actual Peloton users, they would share their passion for the product and the experience, and the good both of these things do for them.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Desrumaux noted:
“Taking a step back, the connected fitness market as a whole is still stuck in its Blackberry era. Devices available today are running on hardware from 2012-2016, and are not up to par with the AI-driven world we live in now.”
“Since launching just last month, GROWL has set a new standard for the connected fitness market. GROWL fuses cutting-edge immersive projection, optic sensing, and edge-computing technologies to turn your home into a high-performance training space.”
“Through those advanced technologies not seen in the devices available today – we’re able to correct your form down to the millimeter, offer a variety of modalities (fitness boxing, technical boxing, yoga, pilates, strength training), and transform your bag into a life-size coach to provide one-on-one motivation. Our focus now is refining that technology to provide a best-in-class experience that keeps users engaged while pushing them out of their comfort zones.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Desrumaux cited:
“Our most notable milestone so far is our launch in early December, where we introduced GROWL to the market and announced our seed funding round. We announced $4.75 million in funding, and the round was led by Skip Capital.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Desrumaux about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One of our earliest investors is former UFC heavyweight champion Ciryl Gane, who’s also a top contender for the UFC title.”
“Cyril is a big gamer – he has a Twitch channel and he loves to play FIFA and Call of Duty, so fighting and gaming are two of his biggest hobbies. The first time he tried the product, it was an early version of the prototype, and he had a blast working on the coach. Then we demonstrated the gaming experience, which was a 5-minute song game where you are punching the bag to the beat of the music and objects appearing on the bag that you have to break, something we built over the course of a weekend we were trying out for the first time. He went all out on that game, punching with full power, full blast for the entire 5 minutes.”
“At the end of the game, he looked at us and took a knee because he was completely out of breath. That’s when we saw that we had managed to win over a UFC heavyweight champion and saw the full potential of the platform, the product, and the engagement. The engagement was so strong that you just forget about everything else—even about your own capacity—and you push through your limits to the point where you have a really impactful workout.”
Funding
When asking Desrumaux about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“When we launched out of stealth in December, we also announced $4.75M in seed funding. The round was led by Skip Capital, with participation from other investors including Kima Ventures, Teampact Ventures, former UFC Heavyweight Champion Ciryl Gane, and notable founders including Jonathan Cherki (Contentsquare), Charles Gorintin (Alan), Nicolas Béraud (BetClic), and Jean Lafleur (Airbyte).”
Total Addressable Market
What is the total addressable market for the company, Desrumaux emphasized:
“In such a wide addressable market, Growl is capable of addressing a wide range of fitness needs and people.
We’re equipped to address a wide array of consumers in the fitness world – whether it’s someone eager to try different fitness trends, someone who’s specifically into boxing, someone who’s also a gamer and wants to be engaged with their workout in a similar way, and people of all shapes and sizes, including young kids and even multiple family members at the same time.
Our content is just as versatile when it comes to 1-on-1 fitness disciplines (yoga, pilates, meditation, stretching), thanks to the combination of life-size immersion and our 3D camera.
All of these give Growl the unique ability to address the needs of a large number of households and people in our target addressable market, further supported by the seamless ability for the product to fit on the wall of pretty much any room that has a ceiling height of at least 7 feet and 3 inches.
All of that said, boxing has the potential to resonate and reach a far wider audience – it just needs to be made more accessible. Its popularity today is clearly a good proxy to size up the depth of Growl’s addressable market, but we believe that it has yet to reach its full potential when it comes to audience.
The awareness around the physical and psychological benefits associated with boxing is clearly growing. Yet, we’ve seen that boxing has been out of reach to most people. Traditional boxing is seen as too intimidating, too technical, and too dangerous to the point that trying a boxing class has not even occurred to the vast majority of people.
On the other hand, fitness boxing, particularly with the launch of Rumble in 2017 (and many others since then), opened the market and improved accessibility to the sport by transforming the traditional, technical, and intimidating approach into an immensely powerful fitness experience everyone can enjoy. Today, Rumble boasts almost three times as many studio locations in the US as the iconic spinning-leader, SoulCycle.
Our intention with Growl is to open accessibility to boxing even more by bringing its full potential straight to your home at a fraction of the price. The question we’re now starting to ask is, “How far can boxing actually go in terms of audience once it is made into a universally accessible fitness discipline?”.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Desrumaux affirmed:
“Experience is everything in connected fitness, but what most companies do is build the experience on top of existing hardware. The truth is, people couldn’t care less about your hardware. That’s why we turned the equation upside-down and bent the technology to fit the experience and the coach.”
“The first thing we did was recreate a personal trainer as if they were physically right by the user’s side. We wanted to recreate that physical, 1-on-1 connection that will provide guidance and motivation while pushing users’ limits along the way. That’s the heart of the experience – not the design, not even the workout itself. Bringing in the presence of a coach will deliver the connection and engagement of a powerful connected fitness product.”
“This goes hand in hand with another major differentiator: the adversarial pace. On every other connected fitness device, you set the pace, you are in control, and you follow your own rhythm. We created a coach to create an adversarial relationship – the coach sets the pace against you and you have no choice but to keep up and stay engaged. That’s exactly where you want to be: In an uncomfortable position where you have no choice but to rise above the fray to raise yourself, in both body and mind.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Desrumaux emphasized:
“We will be focusing on manufacturing efforts, and expect our first products to roll off the manufacturing line sometime within the first half of next year.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Desrumaux concluded:
“We’re offering so much more than a way for users to stay fit and get in the best shape of their lives. Our goal is to inspire confidence and determination, much like boxing has done for me. Combat sports have helped me develop critical traits that brought me to success, and we want to offer the same opportunity to everyone at home by helping them learn hard work and determination while reaching their fitness goals.”
