Paceline: Aligning physical health with financial health
Acrew Capital’s investment in Paceline’s Series A round
As Paceline Founder and CEO, Joel Lieginger, discusses in their founding story, corporate wellness programs exist to incentivize employees to be active and healthy — which, among many other intangible benefits, saves employers money on healthcare. Unfortunately for the rest of us, these financial incentives typically stay within the company. So why isn’t there a program that offers financial rewards to the rest of us who are doing the work of staying healthy?
Enter Paceline.
In our view, the most successful embedded fintech companies will have deep alignment between the application and the financial product — and Paceline has that alignment in spades. Paceline was built to align goals around two of the most important elements of people’s lives: physical health and financial health. In its current form, Paceline’s health and wellness app financially incentivizes consumers to live a healthy lifestyle. But unlike the many consumer apps that have embedded fintech products as an afterthought, Paceline has been thoughtfully architected to ensure that their consumer fitness app, which has had tremendous organic growth, will be meaningfully enhanced by the financial products they launch. And they’ve done so with unique insights around how to align behaviors that promote physical health with those that promote financial health.
Most imminently, Paceline plans to launch a health and wellness rewards credit card, where cardholders will earn tailored, high value rewards for their physical activity in addition to their spending. The card is intended to make health and wellness more accessible to more people, in the same way that travel reward products have done for travel.
Paceline has strong existing user growth and engagement — members have logged 20 million+ workouts, 600 million+ exercise minutes, and, notably, more consistent long-term activity (also known as streaks). “Pacers” (the company’s members) have already earned ~$2mm of rewards to hundreds of brand partners (ex: Home Chef, Echelon, Hyperice, and Brownie Brittle) and can also donate rewards to charity partners (ex: World Food Program USA, Black Lives Matter, ASPCA, among others).
Equipped with 15 years of financial services experience across firms like AIG and AIA himself, Joel has assembled a world-class team of health and wellness advocates, fintech experts and consumer product innovators to advance Paceline’s mission. In leading the Series A, Acrew is honored to welcome the Paceline team to our crew.
By Lauren Kolodny, Vishal Lugani & Maitree Mervana
