Aescape Announces $30Million Series A to Transform the Massage Therapy Experience

Funding will drive additional partnerships, product development, and manufacturing of the company’s AI-powered massage experience

Aescape, a technology company building fully-automated, data-driven massage therapy experiences,announced its $30 million Series A funding round led by Valor Siren Ventures and Valor Equity Partners, an early investor in Tesla and SpaceX, with participation from new investors including Fifth Wall and Alley Robotics Ventures, and from existing investors including Crosslink Capital, Alumni Ventures, and NBA Champion and All-Star Kevin Love.

Aescape is redefining the massage and wellness category through intelligent technology that helps people to feel and live better longer. With this Series A funding, the company will enhance its AI-powered technology and bring The Aescape Experience to the U.S. market in 2023. After a seismic shift in the industry, the company created The Aescape Experience to help fill the widening labor shortage and booming demand for massage therapy. Upon launch, The Aescape Experience is anticipated to transform the massage experience for hospitality, wellness and fitness industries, in addition to providing intuitive solutions and services for the $17.6B US massage therapy industry.

“Our team at Aescape is working to bring beautifully-designed, fully-automated, therapeutic massage and wellness experiences to market with a solution that combines innovative research, revolutionary technology, and a holistic approach to physical wellness and recovery,”said Eric Litman, Founder and CEO at Aescape. “This funding means that our partners are not only investing in our shared vision and world-class team, but also in the future of the wellness industry overall. We’re grateful to our investors for believing in our dream, and we look forward to launching The Aescape Experience in 2023.”

As the pool of available therapists continues to shrink and healthcare services drives toward greater measurability, the hospitality, wellness, and athletic markets need new solutions to structural, industry-wide challenges. Recent research from iSPA, the International Spa Association, shows that the U.S. massage therapy industry is experiencing revenue loss of up to $4bn annually due to a shortage of more than 29,000 therapists, with 82% of resort/hotel spas and 71% of day spas reporting staff shortages. Aescape aims to solve this and help grow the industry by providing operators with a scalable, reliable solution that augments the labor shortage, acts as a support tool for massage therapists and athletic trainers, and gives consumers a consistent, beautiful, data driven approach to recovery.

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“We believe there is a significant opportunity to modernize the category of physical recovery, and Aescape’s pioneering approach to treatment, user experience, and safety should have a considerable role to play in the transformation of the industry,” said Jon Shulkin, Co-President of Valor Equity Partners and Fund Manager for Valor Siren Ventures. “We’re grateful to partner with Eric and the Aescape team to create the new gold standard for soft tissue therapy.”

The company’s all-star team includes senior leadership from Amazon, Bird, FitBit, Peloton, The New York Knicks, Tonal, Meta, Uber, WPP, and others. Aescape is seeing strong partnership traction with category pioneers and global leaders across a wide range of categories and has signed 17 partners who will be the first to launch The Aescape Experience at their locations.

Aescape is on the forefront of consumer innovation, providing a fully-automated massage table that not only solves for the industry’s immense labor gap, but fundamentally enables a more advanced and accessible experience,” shared Kevin Campos, Partner at Fifth Wall. “The application of their deep proprietary technology can span the built world from an employee perk boasted in office spaces, an essential health benefit offered in medical offices to an amenity provided in hotel spas and beyond. Our extensive limited partner network is comprised of the world’s largest corporates across the real estate value chain, who will undoubtedly not only benefit from, but also provide value to Aescape’s deployment.”

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