The Fitness Facilitator

In 2013, a basic personal need drove Neha Motwani, the Co-founder and CEO of Fitternity, to organise and digitise India’s unstructured fitness ecosystem. An MBA from Welingkar Institute of Management and Research, she worked actively for more than five years with Aon Hewitt in human resources and risk consulting.  

A Growth Sector 

The opportunity was evident in a data point. Google Search for fitness activities and centres, despite being high in 2013- 2014, was met with a dead end as 14 million users searched for fitness centres on Google in India. This was due to the lack of online presence of fitness centres and gyms.  

Fitness as a category continues to grow exponentially, especially after the impact of the pandemic. While in India it is still nascent, the fitness penetration is gradually increasing. “We’re currently living in the decade of health, this decade will witness a massive surge not just in fitness penetration levels, but also in innovation and an increase in the number of users,” notes Motwani. 

Fitternity has raised over $7.5 million from blue-chip VC funds such as Sixth Sense Ventures, Exfinity Ventures and marquee investors like Patni family office, Taparia family office, Salgaocar family office and Anjali Bansal. Motwani, along with her co-founder Jayam Vora, spearheaded four rounds of funding from 2014 to 2020.  

A Long Road Ahead 

Fitternity today is a marketplace for fitness with over 15 million consumers and a network of over 12,000 partnered fitness centres pan India across more than 17 workout forms. 

Its inception led to filling the gap between the consumers and their fitness needs. In 2021, Cult.fit acquired the company, and post-acquisition raised capital at a $1.5 billion valuation.  

The Fitternity website was the first offering that enabled users to discover fitness centres, gyms and studios near them, then evolved to a transactional set-up and launched the Fitternity app. Fitternity remained aligned to keep learning from consumers to provide better service. Successfully pioneering the digitisation of fitness outlets, the enterprise has been able to create revenue streams that helped over 12,000 gyms and studios to scale up.