Bollywood star Akshay Kumar invests in GoQii, which took on Flipkart for its deep discounts

• Akshay Kumar has invested an undisclosed amount in GoQii – a health and wellness startup.
• With the investment, Kumar will also be the brand ambassador for the startup.
• GoQii counts investors like Ratan Tata, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, DSG Consumer Partners etc.

Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar invested an undisclosed amount in health and wellness startup GoQii and is now the brand ambassador of the company as well.

“Health is not a short-term goal and can be achieved by adopting a healthy lifestyle. I along with the team of leading GOQii Coaches will be working to making 1.3 billion Indians healthy,” said Akshay Kumar. The actor will also be a GOQii coach conducting live video sessions on GOQii Play.

GoQii, which is founded by Vishal Gondal in 2014, recently started a legal battle against Flipkart for deep discounting of its products.

With the investment, Kumar will also host the India Health Quiz on GoQii’s OTT platform GoQii Play.

Gondal, who used to run a gaming company Indiagames, came up with the idea of GoQii when he stopped exercising during his stint at the gaming company, and gained a lot of weight.

“I tried everything and the only thing that worked was a coach in my neighbourhood who remotely coached me. I ended up running marathons, went to Everest Base camp ,” Gondal had told Business Insider during an interview.

He realised back then that people didn’t lack access to gyms but instead lacked motivation to work out.

Today, GoQii has marquee investors like Ratan Tata, Vijay Shekhar Sharma Mitsui, DSG Consumer Partners among others on its board.

For Gondal, it has been a great journey from being called crazy for starting a hardware startup with a subscription model to today being one of the market leaders along with Xiaomi in the affordable fitness wearable space.

“Another big thing we were able to do was use the health data to give our users discounts from insurance companies. So we went from being a coaching and wearables company to have an entire healthcare ecosystem on our platform,” said Gondal.