Beyond Mobile: 42 Wearables Startups Disrupting Fitness, Apparel, And Healthcare

The wearables industry has cooled off in 2015, with deals and funding down from last year, but a few dozen startups have carved out a place for themselves in certain industries and are taking on established players. We used CB Insights data to identify 42 startups attacking fitness, apparel, healthcare, to name just a few of the areas. We mapped out the startups — one-fourth of them early-stage companies — in the graphic shown below. 

• Unsurprisingly, the largest categories were consumer fitness bands and smart watches, a large and relatively established market led by Jawbone and the now-public FitBit. Other products in this area were more specialized infant wearables (Owlet, Sproutling) or wearables custom-designed for certain sports. For instance, Zepp Labs focuses on “club and bat” sports and Sensoria makes a smart ankle sock for distance runners.
• Biometric sensors was the next largest category, mostly comprised of startups trying to hack the brain and body with high-tech consumer-targeted wearables. For example, Thalmic Labs‘ wearables read electric signals from muscles, Ybrain and InteraXon (Muse) read brainwaves, and Thync transmits mood-elevating neurosignals.
• Startups focused on the enterprise applications were also well-represented. APX Labs and Wearable Intelligence target heavy industry, and Augmedix and Quanttus are bringing smart wearables to healthcare charting and patient monitoring.

The selected 42 companies raised a combined $1.9B in investment over 105 deals. And more than one quarter of the chosen startups are still early-stage companies.

Click image to enlarge.

Below is a full list of the companies in the graphic broken down by target area. If there are other emerging companies that you think should be highlighted, let us know in the comments.

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