The healthcare market is evolving from a focus on ‘measurement’ to a focus on ‘behavioral change.’ While recording sleep, heart rate, and exercise volume through wearable devices has become commonplace, how to interpret the collected data and apply it to one’s life still remains up to the individual. To address this issue, the AI-based Longevity startup TapZero is building a ‘Personal Digital Twin’ platform that analyzes individual biometric data to suggest the optimal timing for health interventions.
TapZero announced on the 8th that it has secured seed investment from Kakao Ventures. The investment amount was not disclosed.
Inducing health behavior changes with personal digital twins
Recently, in the global healthcare market, ‘longevity,’ which involves extending lifespan while maintaining a healthy state rather than simply living longer, is emerging as a major topic.
With the proliferation of wearable devices such as the Oura Ring and Apple Watch, collecting personal health data has become much easier than in the past. In particular, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is garnering attention as a representative indicator for measuring stress and recovery status, establishing itself as core data for managing healthy lifespan. However, most services stop at merely displaying the data. While users can check the numbers, it is difficult to receive specific guidance on what actions to take based on those results.
TapZero views this as a new opportunity. Currently, the company operates ‘HRV Works,’ an HRV-based biological age tracking app, and ‘Fasting Works,’ an AI nutrition analysis app. HRV Works analyzes HRV data measured by wearable devices to provide recovery scores and behavioral guidance. It analyzes sleep patterns and exercise load to help users maintain healthy routines without burnout. It also offers a feature to calculate biological age by combining resting heart rate and sleep quality, and to track the rate of aging.
Fasting Works is a service that automatically analyzes nutritional content based solely on photos of meals. In the future, the plan is to develop it into an AI model that combines HRV data with dietary information to estimate an individual’s metabolic status without the need for a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). What TapZero ultimately aims to build is a personal digital twin. A digital twin is a technology that replicates real-world objects in a digital space to predict their state, and TapZero is expanding this into the realm of personal health.
The goal is to predict how specific behavioral changes will affect future health status by integrating and analyzing various lifelog data, such as sleep, exercise, nutrition, blood sugar, and HRV. The company plans to utilize ontology-based data models to implement causal-relationship-based health simulations, moving beyond simple correlation analysis. For instance, the approach involves inducing behavioral changes by predicting how HRV, resilience, and biological age might shift when a user increases their sleep time or maintains a specific diet.
With this investment, TapZero plans to focus on improving AI analysis accuracy, advancing on-device AI technology, and expanding into the global market. The company also presented a long-term vision to expand into a ‘Personal Decision Intelligence’ platform that combines asset data with health data.
Taeho Kim, the CEO leading TapZero, is a serial entrepreneur with successful exit experience in Silicon Valley. Since then, he has built engineering organizations and data-driven operating systems at companies such as Coupang, Bank샐러드, and Danggeun. Kakao Ventures noted that CEO Kim has proven his execution capabilities in the field of longevity by personally collecting and analyzing his own health data over a long period.
Jang Dong-wook, Managing Director at Kakao Ventures, explained the rationale behind the investment, stating, “If blood sugar spikes changed our dining tables and slow aging changed our eating habits, then HRV will change our entire day.” He added, “CEO Kim Tae-ho is an entrepreneur who has collected more sleep, nutrition, and exercise data than anyone else and applied it to his life.”
CEO Kim Tae-ho stated, “TapZero will grow into a platform that designs daily behaviors using data from the wrist and, furthermore, extends healthy lifespan,” adding, “We will create a mass entry point for Longevity so that anyone can become the person who best understands their own body.”
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