Talofa Games raises $6.3M to build fitness games for good

Talofa Games has secured $6.3 million in seed funding to build fitness games for good.

Focused on the idea of “healthy gaming,” the San Francisco company is the brainchild of Jenny Xu, a competitive fitness enthusiast who has run two marathons.

Talofa Games recently launched the 1.0 version of Run Legends, a cooperative and competitive social fitness game.

Chamaeleon spearheaded the round with contributions from A16Z Games Speedrun, Basis Set Ventures, Insight Partners, 1Up Ventures, and a roster of strategic investors.

I met Xu when her team won the grand prize for the Niantic Beyond Reality Contest in 2019. For that contest, Xu and her family created Run to My Heart. Then going by JC Soft, the company created a social running game built on the Niantic Real World Platform, where you had to run in the real world to certain locations in order achieve goals in the game.

By 2021, the company evolved into Talofa Games. Now it has eight people whose work has collectively generated more than 10 million downloads.

“Having made games for so long, I love just having that scrappy vibe and doing coding myself,” Xu said in an interview with TechForgePulse.

Run Legends

The Run Legends game combines physical activity with compelling mobile gameplay.

Xu announced the game’s testing period in mid-2023, and the team did the formal 1.0 launch a couple of weeks ago. During that time, the beta community grew from 10,000 people to 370,000 players. At the peak, there were 55,000 concurrent workouts happening at the same time.

“We’ve had players telling us they lost five or 10 pounds in a single month. So I think just the impact has been pretty clear,” Xu said.

Players engage in real-time cooperative battles by walking or running alongside friends, fostering an immersive and healthy gaming experience. These battles, lasting five to fifteen minutes, are meticulously designed to allow players to participate without constantly staring at their phones. To add an extra layer of engagement, players can unleash special battle skills based on their movement speed and earn rewards through their in-game Gear.

“Fitness and gaming do not need to be mutually exclusive, and we are extremely proud to build a game that enables players to improve their health while having fun and playing with friends,” said Xu. “We look forward to working with our players to scale this new social fitness experience and create a happier, healthier world.”

The seed funding will play a pivotal role in fueling the continued development of Run Legends and future “games for good” initiatives by Talofa. The game is currently available for free on both iOS and Android platforms.

Xu said the team noticed that most of the mileage people put on the game is while walking, as people play while they are walking instead of running. Players can set up daily step goals or play more passively, making the game more accessible for people who are fitness beginners, Xu said.

“We want to keep making Run Legends better,” she said.

Partnerships like one with the American Red Cross last year will be worth looking into. And the team is considering making new games as well.

Investor views

Xu said that the game got traction in the beta period in 2023, and that enabled the fundraising process to go easier despite the tough venture capital environment. She said she chose to go with investors who were in it for the long haul.

Nuno Goncalves Pedro, managing partner at Chamaeleon, said in a statement, “Gaming is in a league of its own. It is the ultimate interactive media, and it mixes cutting-edge technology with truly creative and unique content. It is our great pleasure to be able to join Jenny and her team at Talofa on her quest to create positive habits at scale.”

Talofa’s seed funding will enable the company to continue to engineer and develop Run Legends as well as other “games for good”. The game is currently available for free on iOS and Android.

“Gaming is in a league of its own. It is the ultimate interactive media, and it mixes cutting-edge technology with truly creative and unique content. It is our great pleasure to be able to join Jenny and her team at Talofa on her quest to create positive habits at scale,” said Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Founder and Managing Partner at Chamaeleon.

“We believe that games are our underlying social fabric and core to the human experience,” said Robin Guo, gaming investment partner at A16Z Games, in a statement. “Talofa is mixing the best of gaming, fitness, and social with Run Legends, designed for you to have fun with your friends and get fit while doing it. Jenny has built many successful indie games in the past with JCSoft, and now she and her team are taking their talents to innovate on something new at this intersection of gaming x fitness.”

“Jenny and the entire Talofa team are pushing the limits of what is possible at the intersection of gaming and fitness,” said Lan Xuezhao, managing partner at Basis Set, in a statement. “We’ve seen this team execute from day one and know they are capable of fundamentally changing the way people build healthy habits with their friends. It’s natural for people to be aspirational about their health and hungry for community, and we’re excited to help create a future of fitness that is both gamified and multiplayer.”

Looking forward

The company is hiring product managers, designers, engineers and others. The team will keeyp trying to make Run Legends better, adding more modes and updating the software.

Xu said she is passionate about fitness. She has run two marathons, and she said she did the last one in two hours and 56 minutes, or about 6 minutes and 40 seconds per mile. She has also made games since she was 12.

“I just love the space and want to make a difference,” she said.