38-year-old Karthik Viswanathan, the Founder of BibVault, is promoting an innovative way of transforming the boring and broken active lifestyle in the local community.
Karthik, originally from Erode in Tamil Nadu, came to Australia in 2008 to work in the IT industry.
He told The Australia Today that the key idea behind his startup is to “empower people to lead an active lifestyle by connecting with event organisers, businesses, sports clubs, and industry experts.”
A few years ago, Karthik suffered a foot fracture which made it almost impossible for him to pursue recreational running. He says:
“During this time, I with the help of my wife, Devipriya, were using a mix of various challenges and small rewards to make rehabilitation interesting and effective.”
So, Karthik brought in his years of IT, consulting and business analysis experience and conducted thorough market research to understand deeper issues around active lifestyle transformation.
The couple soon managed to create this system that uses gamification and socialisation to create an activity-based rewarding platform. Karthik adds that the idea behind this startup is simple:
“When BibVault members move, walk, jog, run or cycle, they accumulate achievement points which
can in turn be redeemed for rewards.”
Karthik’s startup managed to secure funding through Wyndham Council’s Small Business Entrepreneurship and Innovation Grant which provided BibVault with an opportunity to accelerate its software development.
He says:
“Recently we have onboarded six organisations under employee wellness category thus empowering organisations to transform the boring and broken active lifestyle of their employees to an inclusive, gamified, fun filled long term journey.”
These challenges can be achieved virtually from anywhere in the world thus making friends and family members participate as well.
Karthik says that he has started to build BibVault’s rewarding Partner Network and also plans to expand and launch the mobile apps for both Android and iOS. He adds:
“Our partners could be any business that wants to offer their products or services at an exclusive BibVault member discount. In this way, we recognise the achievements of members and bring meaningful potential customers to the businesses.”
BibVault has observed an increased engagement from employees as the innovative platform has seen members clocking over 1750+ active hrs. Karthik is hopeful that his start-up could help bridge the gap that exists in consistent active lifestyle care for employees in small, and medium business organisations in India and Australia.
