ROOK

Post-pitch story

Marco Benitez pitched ROOK in Season 15 (Episode 181, "ROOK: The VC Vibe Check"), raising $1.5 million. ROOK is an API that standardizes health and fitness data from wearables, so apps, insurers and researchers can work with data from any device without building integrations one by one. The panel — Elizabeth Yin, Jesse Middleton, Laura Lucas and Mike Ma — gave the episode its "vibe check" title, and the notes tease that "a familiar face shows up." Whether a deal closed is genuinely unclear. Benitez's founder page doesn't carry a "Funded" tag, and the show's public description doesn't confirm an investment — so for now we're treating the on-air outcome as unconfirmed. ROOK has solid history independent of the show. Founded in 2018 as RookMotion by a team of biomedical engineers, the Miami-based company rebranded to ROOK in 2023 alongside a $1.7 million pre-seed led by NuFund Venture Group, with Techstars and Harvard Business School Alumni Angels among the backers. Benitez serves as CEO alongside co-founders Jonas Ducker, Daniel Martinez, Pepe Esquivel and Oscar Garcia. ROOK published its own blog post about the appearance, focused on its mission of wearable-data interoperability for digital health and pharma — with no new funding news mentioned.