Kevin Hart’s VC firm leads $35M Series B for weight-loss app Simple

Summary

Mike Prytkov said he knows what it’s like to let stress take over one’s life. While building his first company, he said he worked long hours and gained weight. After exiting his company (an adtech company called Appness), he said he tried many things to lose the pounds: extreme workouts, calorie tracking, and fasting. “While it worked, consistency was the hard part,” he told TechCrunch. What he really wanted was a coach who would keep him accountable, he said. So in 2019, he launched Simple, an AI-powered health coaching app that helps people lose weight. Then, in 2023, he added its standout feature: An AI coach named Avo, which helps give tailored advice to users’ needs and progress. “We wanted to help people lose weight without the guilt or grind that is innate to the toxic diet culture,” he said. Having built the company to a current $160 million in ARR with 700,000 subscribers, he said, Simple announced on Wednesday that it closed a $35 million Series B funding round led by actor Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Ventures. The company has raised $45 million in total funding. Prytkov had an early co-founder who has since left the company, leaving him at the helm solo. Avo today handles at least more than 100,000 coaching conversations a day and processes nearly 300,000 daily meal logs, Prytkov said. Users fill out a form to help them build a personalized program, then they are introduced to the AI coach. It collects information, like meal logs, from user input, and it runs assessments that score habits and nutritional quality, he said. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 “The coaching is delivered through a chat powered by LLMs that adapt tone and content to each person, with memory for long-term context and constitution-based fine-tuning,” Prytkov added. Obviously, the app is a direct competitor to Noom, perhaps the most popular behavioral dieting app in the industry, with millions of users.. And it competes with Weightwatchers and MyFitnessPal. Prytkov sai...