Breakthrough VR Basketball App Gym Class Closes $8 Million in Seed Round Led by Andreessen Horowitz
Gym Class Brings the Joy of Physical Play, Community and Competition to Digital Sports; Launches in the Meta Quest Store 2022
LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Gym Class, the most popular VR basketball app on Meta Quest App Lab, with nearly one million downloads, has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Y Combinator. Gym Class combines the fun, fitness, social, and entertainment aspects of real-world sports delivered in best-in-class VR basketball. Gym Class is set to launch on the Meta Quest Store in fall 2022.
“Gym Class is more than a game, it’s a digital sport.” said Paul Katsen, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Gym Class. “It lets you dunk like a pro, become a basketball star, watch, compete, cheer, and get involved in the whole experience of the sport. Just like with real sports, we believe digital sports will see thriving global communities, leagues, entertainment and events, fashion, commerce, fitness, and more.”
Gym Class is a breakout hit on the Meta Quest App Lab as the #2 most popular app with a 4.9 star rating and more than 14K reviews. Driven by word of mouth and community content creation, the app has been organically downloaded by nearly a million people to date. Employing cutting-edge physics and high-fidelity graphics, Gym Class features realistic basketball mechanics, full-body avatars, and immersive environments. Players can connect and play basketball games together on a customizable digital court or simply socialize, even if they are distributed around the world.
“We are convinced that games, virtual worlds and digital sports will be the new social networks,” said Andrew Chen, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). “Gym Class signals the dawn of digital sports. It has the traction, and has the right team behind it to realize the true potential of social VR. We are strong believers in the vision and the team who have already proven Gym Class has a massive audience and opportunity.”
The Gym Class founders joined forces to build a social experience through digital sports leveraging their consumer, virtual reality and gaming backgrounds. Matthew Harris, CEO, who had led VR and gaming teams for years met Justin Hubert, Chief Creative Officer, at Walmart building VR commerce applications. Together with friend Paul Katsen, Chief Product Officer, who led Twitter’s Home Timeline product – the social giant’s largest surface, they created Gym Class. The team has solved the toughest problems in engineering to offer realistic physics, and full body avatars running on mobile hardware. Leveraging early community feedback, and layering compelling social and competition features, Gym Class had already created a breakthrough VR basketball app.
Gym Class is available on Quest App Lab and will officially launch to the Quest Store in fall 2022. Additional information on Gym Class is available at https://gymclassvr.com/ and on the official Gym Class Twitter and Tik Tok channels.
To join the Gym Class community, sign up at discord.gg/gymclassvr.
About Gym Class
Gym Class was founded by Matthew Harris, CEO, Justin Hubert, Chief Creative Officer, and Paul Katsen, Chief Product Office in 2019. They joined forces to build a social experience through digital sports leveraging their consumer, virtual reality and gaming backgrounds. In summer 2022 they raised $8 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Y Combinator. Gym Class, the most popular VR basketball app on Meta Quest App Lab with nearly 1M downloads, combines the fun, fitness, social, and entertainment aspects of real-world sports delivered in best-in-class VR basketball. Gym Class is set to launch on the Meta Quest Store in fall 2022. For more information visit: https://gymclassvr.com/
About Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
Founded in Silicon Valley in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (known as “a16z”) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic: We invest in seed to venture to late-stage technology companies, across bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has $33.3B in assets under management across multiple funds.
About Y Combinator
Y Combinator (YC) is a startup accelerator program and investment fund that supports founders at every stage. Since 2005, over 3,500 companies have participated in the accelerator, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, Instacart, Dropbox, and Coinbase. Today, YC companies have an aggregate valuation approaching $1T. Learn more about YC here.
Contacts
Chase Colasonno
fortyseven communications on behalf of Gym Class
gymclass@fortyseven.com