PhD student David Dunne has worked with Harlequins, QPR and the Ryder Cup team to maximise the physical potential of athletes. Together with ex-PhD Sam Impey, he has raised £450k to launch training companion app Hexis, claimed to be the world’s most intelligent nutrition system. He spoke to us to explain more..
Q - Tell us how Hexis works and who it is for.
Hexis is a performance technology for fitness enthusiasts who want to get more from their body. It uses sport science to optimise your body every day and perform when it matters most. It uses artificial intelligence, to predictively periodise your body’s needs to the demands of your workout, lifestyle and goals.
Q - Have you launched yet - how did that go?
To date we have built our system and tested it rigorously with over 1,000 fitness enthusiasts and elite athletes. The trial was a great success and is currently being written for multiple publications. We raised a £450,000 seed round at a pre money valuation of £6.5m as we prepare to go to market live in both the App and Play stores in early 2022.
Q - What is the gap in the market here and how did you spot it?
Nutrition has been stuck delivering static, generic solutions for decades and is ready for disruption. Fortunately, the information age has armed the world with an improved understanding of human performance. Fitness enthusiasts all over the world can now harvest their body’s physiological data and quantify their outputs. For example, today anyone can track their sleep quality, heart rate variability and resting heart rate to get a detailed understanding of what their body may be capable of on a given day. This progress has helped the world exercise smarter. However, nutrition has been lagging behind and the world is ready to fuel smarter.
Getting to these observations was really inspired from Peter Thiel’s book “Zero to One”. This book helped me ask better questions and exposed me to new conversations and challenges. As a result, I was fortunate to meet some great people, with very different skill sets and expertise, and together as a team we shared the same vision and co-founded Hexis.
