BYG All Set To Go Global As It Gets Half-A-Million Dollar Funding

BYG (Book Your Game) is the Uber for fitness, says Devi Prasad Biswal, founder & CEO of the app-based startup that lets you discover and purchase fitness services from gyms and fitness centres around you. Just as Uber helps you find cabs around you. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup began operations in December last year and launched their Android app in February this year which was soon followed by the iOS app.

The BYG app allows consumers to book their fitness sessions at an “adjusted” price. Through the app, one can buy memberships at gyms or choose fitness sessions in one’s preferred locality on a pay-per-session basis with the ‘Workout Now’ option. BYG offers a best price guarantee to its customers. “If you find anything lower, we will refund you twice the difference amount,” says Biswal.

In April, BYG has received $0.5 million of funding from five angel investors. The two co-lead investors are Sanjay Verma, CEO, Cushman & Wakefield, Asia-Pacific and Amit Khanna, ex-partner KPMG, Accenture. The other three key investors are Sameer Sawhney, CEO, ANZ, Asia-Pacific; Neeraj Biyani, COO, Hector Beverages; and Ishan Manaktala, COO, CoreOne Technologies.

With this funding in their kitty, BYG is on an expansion mode and there’s no stopping Biswal and his co-founder Avijeet Alagathi. Since April, the startup claims to have grown over 50 times, currently clocking 170 bookings per day and Rs 1 lakh worth of transaction value per day. It works on a model where it charges 18 per cent of the transaction charge from the fitness centre. Currently, it has tied up with 1,500 fitness centres across five cities – NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, and Bhubaneswar.

In the next three and a half months, BYG aims to tie up with as many as 5,000 gyms from about 1,500 gym partners currently. It also plans to expand internationally to South East Asia beginning with Singapore and the Philippines by the end of this year.

Apart from the BYG app for consumers, the company has also launched a web-based CRM system for the gyms and fitness centres that would help them communicate better with their customers. Gyms typically face a problem where there are unable to keep track of their memberships which result in low renewals, Biswal says. The fee for the B2B CRM system is Rs 3,000 per month but Biswal says they are offering their customers with a free trail up to six months so that they can realise the benefits of the solution.

In the app-based fitness solution space, they compete with players such as Fiternity, Gympik, and GymTrekker. In the B2B platform, they compete with two major players – FitnessForce and Yoactiv. However, Biswal believes BYG is unique as it offers both the customer-facing and B2B platforms simultaneously.

BYG is targeting the huge unorganised market which comprises about 95 per cent of the fitness market share. Some of its customers or partners include Apple Fitness, Powerhouse, and Anytime Fitness, among others.