Fitness app Steppen has raised $1.65 million in Seed funding to help Gen Z build healthy habits.

The latest round was backed by Sydney VC Galileo Ventures, with support from female founder-focused VC Flying Fox, as well as LaunchVic’s Alice Anderson fund. Startmate also invested after Steppen was successful on its second attempt and was accepted into last summer’s cohort.

Afterpay’s  Anthony Eisen and the Jagen family office also chipped in having initially backed the venture in a $500,000 pre-Seed round in August 2021.

Steppen was cofounded in late 2020 by high school friends Cara Davies, 23, and Jake Carp, 22 – they were even at kindergarten together – with Dave Slutzkin joining in as cofounder and CTO. Davies, the startup’s CEO, was an engineering student at Monash University who worked as an intern at Afterpay.

Since launching in mid 2021, the Steppen app has been downloaded more than 325,000 times, with the US as its leading market, followed by the UK. Users have viewed more than 3 million exercise videos and completed over 75,000 workouts

“A large majority of our users are located in the USA, and at our peak growth we have someone downloading Steppen every 45 seconds,” Davies said.

“Our app is built to help young people who have no idea how to workout. We use the research around habit formation to help our users form a habit around fitness which will actually stick. What really inspires us about Steppen is that we are helping young people live healthier lives.”

Steppen embraces the research around habit formation to help users stick to working out. The app’s design makes it easy for users to track and schedule in their fitness activities.

Davies said Steppen is particularly built for beginners and therefore offers gamified features along with reminders to keep user new to fitness motivated, with more than 6300 workouts on the app.

The new funding will be used to continue with expanding market reach and growth in the US along with research into habit formation.

The app can be downloaded at the iOS App Store.