This morning Terra, a recent Y Combinator graduate building an API for fitness and health data, announced that it has closed a $2.8 million round. The investment includes capital from General Catalyst, Samsung Next, and NEXT VENTURES.

The company intends to hire with its new capital, from a team of four today — the co-founders and two other engineers — to seven this month. Terra expects to staff up to 10 people inside the quarter.

More folks makes sense given the scope of what Terra is building. The company’s APIs allow developers to hook into fitness and health data generated by software and hardware. In order-of-operations terms, Terra CEO and co-founder Kyriakos Eleftheriou told TechCrunch that his company is targeting integration points first with companies that offer APIs, then SDKs and, later, Bluetooth-enabled health wearables. That’s a lot of possible connections, so having more hands on-deck will help the company code up its integration points makes sense.

Sure, providing connective tissue between fitness and health data is neat, but only as cool as the technology that is built using the now-unlocked data. With Terra having attracted around early 100 developers or so to its product according to Eleftheriou, the startup should be starting to form an idea of what’s possible. During an interview with TechCrunch Eleftheriou brought up a neat idea of linking music selection to heart rate. So, as your heart rate goes up — say, from exercise — your music player could read that (Read more...)