Inlight Ventures leads Pre-A round, backing Vespexx's North American expansion and data-driven wellness platform
Vertical wellness startup Vespexx has successfully closed a 2 billion KRW (approximately $1.5M USD) Pre-A funding round, accelerating its push into global markets. The round was led by Inlight Ventures and reflects investor confidence in Vespexx's technology, North American market entry strategy, and the scalability of its data-driven services.
The proceeds will be directed toward service localization in North America, partnership development, premium feature buildout, and the advancement of a global subscription model. Vespexx's broader goal is to integrate femtech innovations into its couples wellness platform and establish a new ecosystem within the relational healthcare market.
Founded in July 2023, Vespexx provides a digital healthcare service centered on its AI-powered couples wellness platform, Signaling — enabling couples to manage their daily lives, health, and women's reproductive health in one integrated experience.
What distinguishes Vespexx's business model is its approach of embedding high-reliability technology into an app-based platform that couples can use easily and repeatedly, making it possible to manage women's health, sexual health, and reproductive health all in one place. The focus is on weaving health management naturally into the fabric of everyday couple life.
Signaling, the company's flagship service, is a couples-exclusive app integrating schedule, emotional, and health management. Within just one year of launch, it has accumulated over 500,000 users across global markets including Korea, the United States, and Japan. A 9x increase in monthly active users and a 54% one-month retention rate reflect the positive outcomes of its user experience focus and data-driven optimization strategy. Signaling continues to expand its feature set as a comprehensive solution covering couples' daily lives and wellbeing — including shared calendars, anniversary tracking, emotional signal analysis, health routine reminders, communication nudges, and financial management. In the second half of this year, an AI feature is planned that will analyze couples' biological rhythms and emotional signals to suggest personalized communication strategies and health routines.
Vespexx has entered into an exclusive agreement with the Sugentech Femtech Research Institute — Korea's largest femtech research institution — to integrate female hormone diagnostic technology into its couples app, while jointly conducting R&D on AI-based digital contraception technology. The company is also integrating its Surearlyz and Surearly Smart hormone diagnostic and ovulation test analysis technologies into the couples platform, with the goal of enabling couples to manage their health together and easily share key health information including menstrual cycles, hormonal changes, and ovulation data.
Q. What strategy did you pursue to secure this investment?
We emphasized that Signaling stands out as a vertical wellness service that achieved rapid growth in both traffic and retention over the past year. We also clearly communicated to investors that we are building technological moats grounded in AI and biotech — going well beyond simple service delivery — and that our expansion potential in global markets is substantial.
Q. How do you plan to use the investment?
The funds will be focused on validating key service hypotheses in the U.S. and Japanese markets and building localized revenue models.
Q. What led you to choose this business area?
After the pandemic, interest in wellness and health spread across all generations, not just specific age groups. According to McKinsey & Company, health has emerged as a top concern among Gen Z, and the global wellness market — valued at approximately $6 trillion — is growing at an annual rate of 7%.
Within this environment, Vespexx honed in on couples — both dating and married — as its core target. Couples invest the most time and money in each other and naturally share a wide range of health-related data. Market research also showed that in global femtech services offering couple-linked features, users who connected with a partner demonstrated higher session duration and return visit rates than those who did not. This confirmed the need for an app that supports healthy, efficient relationships for couples. After extensive app market research, Vespexx launched a calendar-based MVP and achieved product-market fit relatively quickly, recording strong retention and growth from the outset.
Q. What are your short-term goals and ultimate vision?
In the short term, our goal is to become the number one couples wellness app in North America, Japan, and Korea. To get there, we plan to build on a calendar and messaging-centered UX and continue enhancing the service so that AI can manage a wide range of lifestyle and health information for users.
Ultimately, we want to build a service that becomes the definitive reference point in the market — grounded in trusted healthcare technologies like digital contraception — so that Signaling is the first app people think of when it comes to love, family, and relational wellness: the physical, emotional, and social health of people in close relationships, whether as partners, spouses, or families.
Q. What would you like to say to other startups or aspiring entrepreneurs in this space?
Just as Vespexx's core belief is that healthy relationships make healthy individuals, we believe that a healthy industry network makes healthy companies. We hope that domestic wellness startups will grow together, expanding the market and becoming partners who can collaborate on the global stage.
Original Article By:
Invest News | Miri Choi
The content has been translated and edited from the original article.
