Kic co-founder Laura Henshaw will step down as CEO of fitness app Kic, with entrepreneur Jane Martino, co-founder of popular mental health app Smiling Mind, set to take on the job.
In a Linkedin post, Henshaw revealed that she and fellow Kic co-founder Steph Smith have been working with Martino, who has served in an advisory capacity.
With over 850,000 app downloads and 55,000 monthly active users across 121 countries, Kic bills itself as a “leading health & wellness app on a mission to change the relationship people have with wellness and themselves.” The ethos of the app is about promoting the benefits of movement for physical and mental health without weight-loss as a focus. It boasts over 1000 workouts, 800 recipes, & 100 meditations and charges users a monthly $29.99 subscription fee (with cheaper quarterly and annual plans available).
Kic began as a recipe e-book published by Henshaw and Smith and has grown into a multi-million dollar business that competes in the growing Australian fitness app market against Sweat, the Chris Hemsworth-backed Centr, 28 by Sam Wood, and Emily Skye FIT. When you’re holding your own against Thor himself, you know you are doing something right.
Laura Henshaw
Henshaw acknowledged that she knew that serving as CEO wouldn’t be permanent and was working to grow the business to a point where a leader could be brought in to take on the running of it.
“As founders, Kic truly does feel like our baby – we’ve put everything over the past 10 years into getting it to where it is today, alongside our incredible team (without whom Kic wouldn’t exist). So, when Steph and I started the conversation about 18 months ago about bringing someone else into the role, we knew it would be quite the task to find the right person,” Henshaw wrote.
“Someone who would continue to champion our amazing community alongside us, whose life’s work felt deeply connected with our mission (as it does for Steph and I), and who could not only work alongside us on our vision but expand it – enabling us to support our community in a bigger and better way than ever before.”
Henshaw spoke highly of Martino and of what she could bring to the business: “We have some huge plans for next year (and, as scary as it feels to say, our biggest plans yet as a business), and having Janey as part of our leadership team and as CEO is so exciting for how much we’ll be able to achieve together.”