Rithmio recognizes your every gesture — and now has $3 million in the pocket

On its own, the average activity tracker can be pretty inaccurate when it comes to determining a user’s gestures. But a gesture recognition software from Chicago-based Rithmio can make these kinds of gadgets far more precise. The potential for Rithmio’s platform is so great that the company just closed a $3 million seed round of financing co-led by KGC Capital and Intel Capital.

With the raise, Rithmio intends to solidify key partnerships in the wearables space to achieve its goal of becoming the world’s leading gesture recognition platform.

“Activity tracking is incomplete today,” Rithmio CEO Adam Tilton tells Wearables.com. “The device is restricted to one limb and activities tracked are a mere fraction of how a person moves in a day. Wearables will quickly evolve past the device into multiple devices working in unison to track how the entire body moves.”

The company opened sign ups for its SDK this week and is hopeful that developers and product teams at startups and stalwarts alike will come calling. As Tilton puts it, what Rithmio can do goes far being using motion data for fitness use cases.

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“Today a physical therapist shows a patient how to do a rehabilitation exercise in the office and gets very little insight on how well or whether at all a patient performs the exercise at home,” he says. “We can solve this problem and make an impact on outpatient care with our technology.”

Intel Capital’s investment in Rithmio is one of many recent strategic moves including Recon Instruments, Thalmic Labs, and Basis. Earlier this year at CES, Intel also announced a button-sized system on chip called Intel Curie that’s anticipated to be released in late 2015.

“Intel is exploring a wide range of potential applications for wearable tech and gesture recognition,” said Steven Holmes, vice president of the New Devices Group and general manager of the Smart Device Innovation team at Intel. “We look forward to working with Rithmio as they push the boundaries of their solution.”