Cora

Cora is a consumer mobile application that acts as an AI fitness and health coach. Users describe their goals, schedule, experience level, equipment, preferences and physical limitations in conversation rather than through a questionnaire, and Cora generates a training week, calorie and macro targets, and a recovery baseline. The plan is continuously revised as sleep, recovery, travel, schedule changes or missed workouts alter the picture; the marketing material describes an agentic system that reads body signals and acts on them rather than only displaying charts.

Functionally the app spans four areas: training (strength and cardio programming, workout logging of sets and reps, per-muscle recovery tracking, training load and fitness trends, live workout tracking on iPhone and Apple Watch with heart-rate zones), nutrition (calorie, macro and micronutrient targets; logging by text, photo or barcode; meal plans, recipes and restaurant suggestions), sleep and recovery (a 0-100 "Body Charge" score derived from sleep, HRV and resting heart rate, plus strain and daily/weekly sleep insights), and habits (routines, streaks). It also surfaces strength benchmarking with estimated 1RMs and demographic percentile ranking, plus metrics such as VO2 max, heart-rate recovery and cardio-fitness percentile.

Cora is distributed across multiple surfaces: an iOS app requiring iOS 17.0 or later, an Apple Watch app, iMessage chat for questions and logging, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that lets AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude read the user's Apple Health and Cora data, answer questions, log meals or workouts and update training plans with the user's permission. The App Store developer of record is PurplePill AI. [0][1][3][4][5][7]

Founding story

Founders Josh Passell and Aditya Ganapathi grew up together in Palo Alto, while Josh Passell and Ryan Ali met on their first day at Cornell in an economics class. Before Y Combinator the team worked on an AI video dubbing tool and then PurplePill, which used AI to automate selling goods and sold over $25k of goods. In their YC batch they launched Purple/HeyPurple, an AI leasing assistant for landlords and property managers, with a stated broader vision of AI virtual employees for small businesses. Aditya Ganapathi was previously an AI/robotics researcher at Google Brain and UC Berkeley; Josh Passell studied economics at Cornell (class of 2021). [7]

Business model

Consumer subscription software. The iOS app is listed as free with in-app purchases and states that it requires a subscription; the website offers a 7-day free trial with full access and cancel-anytime terms. No hardware is sold — the product relies on devices users already own. [0][3][4][5]

Paid subscription to the mobile app, preceded by a free trial period. [0][4][5]

Traction

The iOS app holds a 4.8 average rating from 436 ratings on the US App Store, and the website also cites a 4.8-star rating. The app is roughly 200 MB, localized in English plus 16 more languages, and was updated to version 1.2.6 within the last week of collection, adding micronutrient tracking and user data export. Y Combinator lists the team size as 3. [0][4][5][7]

Latest developments

Version 1.2.6, released about six days before collection, added micronutrient tracking (fiber, sodium, saturated fat, cholesterol, potassium, calcium, iron, vitamin D, added sugars, trans fat, caffeine), detailed nutrition facts views, personalized nutrient goals synced with Apple Health, and export of nutrition, training, sleep, activity, body, habits, journal and profile data. The company also lists its MCP integration for ChatGPT, Claude and other MCP clients as live. A developer response to a review mentions an upcoming weight-tracking feature. [0][4][5]