Growl: The AI-Powered Boxing Coach That Brings Connected Fitness to Your Home

This new startup wants to be your AI-powered boxing coach

The connected fitness company has raised $4.75 million in seed funding. The connected fitness boom of pandemic-era lockdowns is long behind us (hopefully), but Growl, a new startup, is still looking to bolt a workout to the wall of your home. Think of Tonal, except instead of resistance training, it's a boxing-inspired heavy bag session. The wall-mounted Growl is, according to the company, powered by AI and Unreal Engine and appears to have overhead projectors, which beam the image of a life-sized coach onto the convex punching surface. 3D motion tracking technology claims to gather information about your form and technique and provide insights. Besides the projection, the bag has an interactive coaching system to help motivate users. It also supposedly supports side-by-side training, which works great for training partners. Growl isn't available yet, but pre-sales are likely to open in April 2025. Pricing is projected to be between $150 and $190 a month, putting it on the steeper end of fitness devices, if it ever ships. And keep in mind you'll need to install this thing into a wall that can withstand hours of punching.

This AI-powered punching bag looks like the future of fitness

Subscribe to the Design newsletter.The latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday Additionally, the time-of-flight sensors are used to monitor positioning and provide a responsive training environment from anywhere in the room. The cameras are located on the wings of the boxing frame, top and bottom, so regardless of your height, left or right-handedness, it captures and recreates your skeleton in real-time, Desrumaux says. If you are lifting weights and doing other exercises, Growl knows exactly how you are doing it. The bag itself is a different form of a traditional heavy boxing bag. Instead of hanging freely, Growl's reinforced boxing bag has a frame backplane that attaches to a wall in your home. The surface is made of leather and inside is foam. "You can shoot it with bullets, and it's not going to break because it's like punching a mattress against your wall," he says. This will guarantee its durability, he claims, which is a main concern for consumers because, obviously, hitting your expensive piece of hardware won't quite work if it can't sustain the abuse long term. The other fundamental part of Growl is the software. The AI component runs in the CPU that holds the bag. Desrumaux describes it as "the brain of the system." He says it uses custom machine learning algorithms that have been trained to recognize proper form, detect flaws, and deliver corrective feedback instantaneously. "Growl isn't just counting your reps or measuring power," Desrumaux tells me. "It's actively analyzing your entire workout and adjusting the training program accordingly."