Flexia Pilates raised $4 million to grow sales of smart exercise equipment

Sacramento-based Flexia Pilates has raised $4 million in seed funding to grow sales of its smart reformer, which is an exercise station that uses artificial intelligence and sensors to help people work out correctly.

Kaleen Canevari, a mechanical engineer and a Pilates instructor, founded the company two years ago to make home equipment for Pilates workouts.

“I saw a big gap in what was available,” she said. “Most reformers are very unfriendly for a home.”

Most Pilates reformers are big, heavy, complex and designed to be used in a Pilates studio with an instructor, she said.

She decided to tackle the problem of how to take the reformer out of the studio. She had been a traveling Pilates technician working on reformers for about five years, and she decided to design and build a home version herself.

The home version she built is adjustable, can be tilted up to conserve space and can come with an online Pilates instruction subscription, which also picks up real-time information from sensors on the reformer to make sure the user is working out optimally. Buyers don't have to use the online capabilities, but then they don't get the benefit of the sensors.

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