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Retrofit bulks up corporate weight-loss effort with BSwift

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Retrofit bulks up corporate weight-loss effort with BSwift

Chicago's Retrofit Inc., a tech-enabled weight-loss startup backed by J.B. Pritzker, Larry Levy and Jai Shekhawat, is teaming with BSwift, a Chicago-based health insurance services company.

BSwift L.L.C. will offer Retrofit's weight-loss program through its Springboard Marketplace, an a la carte private health exchange that will roll out this fall to hundreds of employers to offer benefits to workers, as well as benefit brokers. Overall, BSwift operates exchanges used by hundreds of companies, as well as providing technology to brokers, payroll providers and other exchanges.

The partnership is important for Retrofit, which is trying to crack the corporate market for its weight-loss program. The program, which uses online-video consultations with nutritionists, behavior consultants and physical trainers, has been popular with executives and professionals trying to shed pounds. It also launched a group program earlier in the year.

“With the corporate market, you get dozens or hundreds of customers, versus one at a time,” says Retrofit CEO Jeff Hyman.

He's signed up a few hundred companies, such as Salesforce.com, Google Inc. and Zappos.com, to offer Retrofit to their employees. He's been trying to make inroads with insurers and brokers in an effort to reach larger pools of customers.

Customers pay about $25 to $100 a month, on average, for the service, depending on whether it's subsidized by the employer. On average, Retrofit clients are on the program for about 11 months and drop about 20 pounds, or around 9% of their weight.

The partnership brings together two fast-growing Chicago tech companies.

BSwift, which raised $51 million in private equity earlier this year, has nearly doubled staff in the past year to more than 300. It provides technology for employers and online health exchanges run by companies or carriers, which offer coverage to about 5 million users.

“We continue to see an uptick in the offering of weight-loss programs by employers,” said Brad Wolfsen, a senior vice president at BSwift. “We're also seeing more and more interest in accountable wellness where individual employee is responsible for meeting certain targets. Retrofit's solution does that. It is set up for the individual. The simplicity resonated. The nutritional diary is as easy as taking pics of your plate with a smartphone instead of writing everything down.”

Retrofit, founded three years ago, has raised $15.7 million in venture capital and has a customer base “in the low thousands,” Mr. Hyman says. It has more than 50 employees, up about 50% percent from a year ago.

John Pletz writes for Crain's Chicago Business, a sister publication of Business Insurance.

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