Spren

Transforms smartphone cameras into biomarker sensors for body composition, HRV, and health metrics.

Website: https://www.spren.com/

Cover Block

Field Value
Name Spren
Tagline Transforms smartphone cameras into biomarker sensors for body composition, HRV, and health metrics
Headquarters Asheville, NC
Founded 2014 (originally as Elite HRV)
Stage Seed
Business Model B2B2C
Industry Healthtech
Technology Type AI / Machine Learning, Computer Vision
Geography North America
Growth Profile Venture Scale
Funding Label Seed
Total Disclosed ~$11.3M

Links

The Short Version

Spren is a healthtech company that converts an ordinary smartphone camera into a measurement instrument for body composition, heart rate variability, and related physiological signals, then licenses the underlying SDK and API to fitness and wellness brands rather than selling a consumer app of its own [Spren.com] [Spren Docs]. The company began life in 2014 as Elite HRV, a heart-rate-variability tool aimed at athletes, before rebranding to Spren and broadening into a wider biomarker platform under founder and CEO Jason Moore, who is based in Asheville, NC [Athletech News] [LinkedIn, 2026]. Co-founder and COO Vivek Menon, a Dartmouth alumnus, has run product and operations across both eras of the company since 2017 [Crunchbase] [The Org]. In October 2022 Spren closed roughly $11.3 million in seed capital led by Drive by DraftKings, with participation from Eli Manning, Theo Epstein, Boston Seed Capital, Karlani Capital, Permit Ventures, and High Country Impact Fund [Benzinga, Oct 2022] [Crunchbase, Oct 2022]. The differentiation rests on a published validation claim of 0.95 correlation to gold-standard body composition methods and 2.6% mean absolute error against DXA, underwater weighing, and 5-compartment models, work the company attributes to Pennington Biomedical Research Center and university partners [Spren.com]. Distribution is moving from pure SDK sales toward branded deployments such as Snap Fitness, which has rolled out AI body composition scanning across its 1,100+ gyms via a Spren partnership [FITT Insider]. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the questions that matter for investors are whether the partner pipeline converts into recurring per-scan or per-seat revenue, whether the accuracy claims hold across skin tones and lighting conditions in production, and whether a Series A materializes against measurable usage rather than logo count.

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, Benzinga, FITT Insider, and the company's own developer documentation.

The Company in Brief

Spren's origin sits a decade back. The entity was incorporated in 2014 by Jason Moore as Elite HRV, a heart-rate-variability application targeted at endurance athletes, coaches, and biohackers, with Moore positioned publicly as a biomarker specialist with a coaching background [Athletech News] [FITT Insider]. The company is headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina [LinkedIn, 2026] [High Country Impact Fund].

The Elite HRV-to-Spren transition was an expansion. The HRV measurement work, which used the smartphone camera and flash to read pulse waveforms from a fingertip, served as the technical and data foundation for a wider biomarker platform. Vivek Menon joined in 2017 and currently serves as co-founder and COO, having run product and operations through the rebrand [The Org] [Crunchbase]. The rebrand to Spren coincided with the October 2022 seed round, which the company framed publicly as the launch of a "camera-enabled biomarker platform" [Benzinga, Oct 2022].

The most significant post-funding milestones publicly attributable to Spren are the publication of validation work conducted with Pennington Biomedical Research Center on body composition accuracy, and a commercial partnership with Snap Fitness to deploy AI body composition scanning across more than 1,100 gyms worldwide [Spren.com] [FITT Insider].

Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Crunchbase, Athletech News, FITT Insider, and Benzinga.

What They Have Built

The core product is Spren Vision, a computer-vision and deep-learning stack that turns a smartphone camera into a biomarker sensor [Spren.com]. According to the company's developer portal, the platform exposes heart rate variability, heart rate, respiration rate, body fat, an acute mental stress score, a cardiorespiratory fitness score, and physiologically based activity guidance, with brands integrating either through native SDKs or via a REST API for partners that already capture sensor data [Spren Docs]. A separate Body Composition product line lets users photograph themselves to estimate body fat and lean mass changes from home, which is the workflow that anchors the Snap Fitness deployment [Spren.com] [FITT Insider].

The technical claim that matters most commercially is accuracy. Spren publishes a 0.95 correlation to gold-standard body composition methods and a 2.6% mean absolute error figure, attributing the validation to Pennington Biomedical Research Center and university collaborators across what it describes as a 240-plus participant study [Spren.com]. The architecture leans on what the company calls "billions of data points" accumulated across the Elite HRV and Spren eras [Spren Docs].

The go-to-market is explicitly white-label. The developer documentation emphasizes that "there's no brand interference" and that users do not have to sign up for a separate Spren account, which is consistent with a B2B2C posture aimed at fitness apps, gyms, corporate wellness providers, and at least one online diabetes prevention program offering [Spren Docs] [Spren.com].

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product features confirmed by Spren.com and Spren Docs; the headline accuracy figures are sourced primarily to the company's own blog and a partner press release.

Market Research and Opportunity

The market case for Spren rests on a shift: measurement that used to require a clinic, a chest strap, or a $100,000 DEXA machine is migrating to the device already in the user's pocket [Wits & Weights]. The October 2022 launch release framed the opportunity against a $1.5 trillion global wellness market [PRWeb, Oct 2022] [Benzinga, Oct 2022].

Metric Value
Global wellness market $1.5T
Spren validation cohort 240+ participants
Snap Fitness rollout footprint 1,100+ gyms

Demand drivers are concrete. Connected fitness operators are under pressure to justify membership pricing with measurable outcomes, which makes a credible at-home body composition scan a retention tool. Corporate wellness budgets continue to favor programs with measurable health-risk reduction, and the company has explicitly stood up an online diabetes prevention program offering as a regulated-adjacent use case [Spren.com]. On the developer side, every consumer fitness app that wants to add physiological measurement faces a build-versus-buy decision against a dataset Spren claims spans years of HRV and body composition collection [Spren Docs].

Adjacent and substitute markets are non-trivial. Wearables (Apple Watch, Whoop, Oura, Garmin) already deliver HRV and increasingly approximate body composition through bioimpedance scales and ring-based metrics, while clinical-grade body composition stays anchored to DXA and InBody hardware. Spren sits in the seam: more accessible than the clinical hardware, more brand-flexible than the wearable incumbents who are unlikely to license their stack to a competing fitness app.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- TAM citation is a single recycled figure; segment dynamics inferred from Spren's primary materials and partner press.

Who Else Is Fighting for This

Spren is positioned not as a consumer wearable but as the measurement layer that consumer wellness brands embed. The competitive map breaks into three tiers. The incumbents in physiological measurement are the wearable platforms: Apple, Whoop, Oura, Garmin, and Fitbit/Google all capture HRV and resting metrics natively, and several have moved into body composition through accessory scales or bioimpedance rings. The challenger tier in computer-vision body composition includes companies such as Made Health and Fitness, Amazon's discontinued Halo body scan, and a handful of smaller scanning apps. The adjacent-substitute tier is the clinical and semi-clinical hardware footprint: DXA, InBody, Styku, and Fit3D, all of which sit inside gyms, clinics, and physician offices and which the Snap Fitness deployment is implicitly competing against on a cost-per-scan basis [FITT Insider].

Spren's most defensible edge today is the combination of dataset scale accumulated across the Elite HRV years and a published accuracy claim that is unusually specific for the category, anchored to named research partners [Spren.com] [Spren Docs].

Data Accuracy: ORANGE -- No direct competitors confirmed in source material; landscape constructed from category knowledge anchored to Spren's own positioning and the Snap Fitness press citation.

Opportunity

If Spren executes, the prize is to become the default measurement API beneath a category of wellness software that is still building its instrumentation layer.

The headline opportunity. The single largest outcome Spren could plausibly become is the embedded biomarker layer for connected fitness, sitting inside hundreds of branded apps and gyms while remaining invisible to the end user [Spren Docs]. The cited evidence makes that outcome reachable rather than aspirational on three counts: a published accuracy figure that gives partners regulatory and marketing cover [Spren.com], a named anchor deployment across more than 1,100 Snap Fitness locations that converts the pitch from concept to reference architecture [FITT Insider], and a capital base that combines a category-relevant lead (Drive by DraftKings) with high-signal sports operators (Eli Manning, Theo Epstein) [Benzinga, Oct 2022].

Growth scenarios.

Scenario What happens Catalyst Why it's plausible
Gym-chain default Spren becomes the standard body composition scan layer across national and regional gym chains Snap Fitness publishes retention or revenue lift data tied to scans [FITT Insider] An anchor of 1,100+ locations is already live and producing operational data
Embedded fitness API Consumer fitness apps license Spren rather than build native HRV and body composition A top-50 fitness app integrates the SDK and credits Spren publicly Developer portal, SDKs, and API are productized today and explicitly white-label [Spren Docs]
Corporate wellness and DPP Spren plugs into employer wellness programs and diabetes prevention vendors as the at-home measurement layer Expansion of the company's online diabetes prevention program offering into payer or employer channels [Spren.com] Validated body composition is a credible biomarker for metabolic risk programs

What compounding looks like. The flywheel is dataset-driven. Every partner scan that flows through the SDK, with appropriate consent, retrains the underlying models and widens the gap on accuracy across skin tones, lighting conditions, and body types. The Elite HRV legacy gives the company an unusually long head start on this loop relative to anyone starting today [Spren Docs].

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenarios anchored to confirmed partnerships and product capabilities; valuation analogies labeled as scenarios rather than forecasts.

Sources

  1. [Spren] Spren - Body Scans In Your Smart Phone | https://www.spren.com/
  2. [Spren] Spren Vision | https://www.spren.com/business/spren-vision
  3. [Spren] Body Composition - Spren | https://www.spren.com/business/body-composition
  4. [Spren] The Latest Spren Vision Validation Research | https://www.spren.com/blog/the-latest-spren-vision-validation-research
  5. [Spren] Online Diabetes Prevention Program | https://www.spren.com/online-diabetes-prevention-program
  6. [Spren Docs] Welcome - Spren Docs | https://docs.spren.com/
  7. [Spren Docs] Getting Started - Spren Docs | https://docs.spren.com/getting-started
  8. [Crunchbase] Spren - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/spren
  9. [Crunchbase, Oct 2022] Seed Round - Spren - 2022-10-11 | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/spren-seed--eb763ec8
  10. [Crunchbase] Vivek Menon - Co-Founder, COO @ Spren | https://www.crunchbase.com/person/vivek-menon-f65c
  11. [Benzinga, Oct 2022] Eli Manning, Theo Epstein, Drive by DraftKings back Spren in closing more than $11 million in seed capital | https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/22/10/n29221264/eli-manning-theo-epstein-drive-by-draftkings-back-spren-in-closing-more-than-11-million-in-seed-ca
  12. [PRWeb, Oct 2022] Spren seed funding announcement (via Crunchbase round profile) | https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/spren-seed--eb763ec8
  13. [FITT Insider] Spren Achieves Gold Standard Body Composition Accuracy Using Only Your Phone Camera | https://insider.fitt.co/press-release/spren-achieves-gold-standard-body-composition-accuracy-using-only-your-phone-camera/
  14. [FITT Insider] Snap Fitness Launches AI Body Composition Scanning and Personalized Nutrition at 1,100+ Gyms Worldwide Through Spren Partnership | https://insider.fitt.co/press-release/snap-fitness-and-spren-partner-for-ai-body-composition-scanning-and-personalized-nutrition/
  15. [Athletech News] Spren (formerly Elite HRV) coverage | (publisher article, URL via Athletech News archive)
  16. [Wits & Weights] Can Your Phone Replace a $100K DEXA for Body Fat and Physique Tracking? (Jason Moore), Ep 367 | https://www.witsandweights.com/podcast-episodes/can-your-phone-replace-a-100k-dexa-for-body-fat-and-physique-tracking-jason-moore
  17. [LinkedIn, 2026] Vivek Menon - Spren (Elite HRV) | https://www.linkedin.com/in/vvkmenon
  18. [The Org] Spren team profile (Vivek Menon tenure since 2017) | https://theorg.com/
  19. [LeadIQ] Spren Company Overview, Contact Details & Competitors | https://leadiq.com/c/spren/5a1dc39d2300005a00c560b2
  20. [High Country Impact Fund] Portfolio Company News | https://www.highcountryimpactfund.com/news/category/Portfolio+Company+News
  21. Spren on X - seed round announcement | https://x.com/sprenlabs/status/1580226688872378369

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