Venus Williams backs French startup that rewards you for walking

Venus Williams is most famous for being one of the best tennis players of all time, but she’s also a prolific angel investor. In her latest business move, Williams has backed French startup WeWard.

WeWard is a free app that offers real-world rewards for walking. It tracks your steps and lets you earn points (called “Wards”), which can be exchanged for gift cards, donations, or discounts. The goal is to encourage people to be more active while benefiting from their daily movement.

Williams has invested an undisclosed sum in the company and will also act as an ambassador. WeWard, meanwhile, has committed to donating $25,000 to her charity, CARE, and will host a month-long “Venus Williams Championship” where users can unlock up to $40,000 in donations by reaching step milestones. 

“A large part of staying well and active is simply by moving your body whichever way you can, and with WeWard, walking becomes a fun and rewarding experience,” said Williams, whose portfolio also includes French social investing app Shares and Pelago, a British startup tackling substance abuse via “virtual clinics.”

Beyond physical rewards, users can collect virtual trading cards — dubbed WeCards — placed at specific locations on the map, a bit like Pokémon Go. Users can compete with friends or join virtual leagues, tracking their progress on leaderboards and earning gold, silver, or bronze medals based on activity levels. 

The idea is to incentivise people to walk further and more often — and it seems to be working. Approximately 6.5 million WeCards are collected daily by the roughly 20 million people who use the app, the company said.

Walking plans

WeWard’s CEO, Yves Benchimol, founded the startup in 2019 alongside Nicolas Hardy and Tanguy de la Villegeorges. The company is almost completely bootstrapped, save for a few hundred thousand euros in seed funding raised in 2020. 

While WeWard has not raised much capital itself, it has handed plenty of money out. To date, the company has given $20mn in cash back to users and $1mn to charity partners, it claims.

WeWard generates revenue through retail partnerships, advertising, and features like “Playtime,” where users can earn additional rewards by engaging with third-party mobile games directly through the app. 

WeWard is just one of a cohort of pro-walking fitness startups. Rivals include Walk15, a Lithuanian company that’s trialled its tech with public healthcare services. Walk15’s co-founder and CEO, Vlada Musvydaitė-Vilciauske, told TNW last year that she wants to create “a pharmacy for walking.”