At Geekdom Friday night, WiseWear Corp. officially launched Evolve its all in one wearable fitness tracking device.
“It’s been a wild journey this past year,” said Gerald Wilmink, the company’s founder and CEO.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded in 2013, plans to kick off a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sale the device, which can be worn as a watch or clipped onto clothing. It tracks fitness activity, sleep and more.
Wearables is a hot market right now. The market is expected to top $14 billion this year and grow to more than $70 billion by 2024, according to a report from IDTechEx, a research firm based in the United Kingdom. Some of the most popular devices on the market are Fitbit One, Jawbone UP24, Basis Carbon Steel Edition and the Garmin Vivofit. And more devices are added all the time.
In Austin, Atlas Wearables, a Techstars company, created a fitness device that tracks all kinds of fitness activity. It is expected to deliver its first devices to customers next month.
WiseWear plans to make its Evolve device available for sale in 2015. And its Kickstarter campaign is expected to launch any day now.
During the event at Geekdom, Wilmink thanked his investors and backers and introduced the team behind WiseWear which consists of several engineers with PhDs and patents and several C-level executives with MBAs and sales and marketing experience.
Earlier this year, WiseWear, in a profile in Silicon Hills News’ Life Sciences Issue, said its Evolve device would adhere to a user’s chest “with ultrathin, ultra soft, transfer-printed micro-circuitry and sensors.” But the company wasn’t able to commercialize that technology for manufacturing, Wilmink said. So it developed an alternative technology in house for a device that is about the size of a poker chip and can communicate with a smartphone via Bluetooth technology.
WiseWear Kickstarter from Chris Bourke on Vimeo.
