Mumbai-based totally health and fitness discovery platform Growfitter has raised $600K in a Pre-Series A round of funding from San Francisco-based totally VC SQue Capital. With this spherical, Karan Chellani, Partner SQue Capital will be a part of the Board of the agency and Mukesh Makhija, the Managing Partner of Grace Capital Venture, will be part of Growfitter as an Advisor.
“Our fund is centered on AI, Healthtech, Fintech and on line retail sectors. Growfitter is one of the startups in health and fitness area that's operating on middle AI and Machine Learning technology and keeps to develop with a focus to help build and create a complete environment inside the preventive healthcare area. We foresee inside the subsequent three-5 years AI may be the key in each technology startup”, stated Karan Chellani Managing Partner SQue Capital.
Growfitter become released in 2015 with the aid of the duo Sanmati Pande and Harshit Sethy. It aims to offer an incentivised well being program, to build man or woman fitness quotient, by motivating and rewarding human beings to undertake an energetic and more healthy life-style.
Sanmati is a qualified Chartered Accountant, CPA (Australia) & MBA in Finance and Harshit has done Masters in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from IIIT Hyderabad.
“Harshit is my nephew and when I shared the concept with him, we concept Finance and AI might be a deadly aggregate to outrage our friends,” tells Sanmati.
With Growfitter, the duo objectives to revolutionise the health and fitness enterprise in India, in line with their system learning and artificial intelligence information. At, the equal time, the startup pursuits to provide solutions to human beings that could encourage them to sign up for gyms and health centres.
Growfitter claims to have already clocked $1.5 Mn in gross revenue via promoting 30K+ fitness memberships thru the portal. The fitness and health startup is also witnessing month on month increase through 25%. By 2018, the business enterprise additionally plans to increase into 20 extra Indian cities and enter into global markets beginning from Canada, Middle East, and Sri Lanka.
The GrowFitter Opportunity: Making Health And Fitness A Fun ‘Activity’
With the Millennials work schedules stretching beyond eight-10 hours and gyms becoming expensive to have enough money, each day workout routines aren't a priority for plenty. This is similarly complemented by means of the truth that the price of fitness penetration in India is simply 0.37% and this consists of simplest the ones having a fitness club in a health club or a health membership. Even globally, there are 67% humans with gymnasium memberships who in no way use them.
As consistent with surveys, apart from crowd and cash, most of the people give up gym as they find themselves out of the area with system and the ordinary health regime compelled on them. Thus, with a mantra – “Going to the Gym is a dependancy, and addiction is what continues you taking place,” Sanmati and Harshit located an possibility to make fitness and fitness a ‘amusing and rewarding’ interest for the consumers in a two-fold way.
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As an aggregator inside the health and fitness domain, the startup offers purchasers discounted offers on health club memberships from 8000+ health centres throughout 14 towns, with maximum maximum customers from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Growfitters is also an one-of-a-kind partner for Talwalkars Better Value Fitness, a listed health chain, which is likewise a minority stakeholder within the company and is currently the use of answers in forty of its gyms. This lets in the startup to move pan India with one client, towards a majority of different gamers who are on the whole serving localised carrier providers.
Other startups on this domain which are imparting similar offerings include Book Your Game, Fitternity, Gympik, FitTicket, Fitraq, and FitPass.
On this, Sanmati defined that Growfitters has additionally collaborated with insurance businesses consisting of Aditya Birla Health Insurance, in which based totally on the clients’ daily health regime, he/she will be able to get incentives on their medical health insurance top rate.
He adds, “In these days’s time, we pay a heavy medical health insurance top class, most effective with very few incidences in lifestyles in which we are able to without a doubt make a declare. On the alternative aspect, every claim is a huge liability at the insurance organizations. This has resulted in losses on both facets. With Growfitters, we offer an man or woman to maintain a healthful life-style by means of going regularly to the health centres and with the progressed way of life, get a reduction on his/her health insurance top rate. A win-win on both facets.”
The Growfitter founders have additionally added the idea of ‘morning fitness parties’ to create a robust community of fitness and fitness fans. These events, held at health clubs and 5-big name inn grounds, no longer only help the startup in constructing its brand however also assist its partnered fitness centres to immediately interact with their ability target audience. And the a laugh comes in conjunction with Yoga, EDM Music, Zumba and hundreds of other health and health activities at one region. “The high-quality part is – the whole occasion is based on sponsorships, so we need to spend real low on our wallet,” says Sanmati.
Growfitters: Banking On The B2B2C Business Model
According to Pande, majority gamers in this area are targeting B2C segment. However, with Growfitters, they are additionally offering company answers. “This enables us in reducing our client acquisition expenses and keep our coins burn intact,” he added.
Further, in evaluation to its competition, the startup is likewise supplying backend POS cloud software program to control day-to-day activities to its associate gyms. This consists of monitoring attendance, preserving running shoes and customers facts, sending bulk SMS, etc.
Again, a similar SaaS platform is supplied by using Book Your Game, which enables its associate gyms to manage leads and participants efficiently at one region and with timely automatic notifications and updates, or even allows in centered advertising to prospective customers through the BYG app.
Growfitter has tried to gainsay this opposition by way of adding a charge characteristic. “The fundamental pain factor inside the gymnasium is that the owner by no means sits there and maximum transactions are in coins, so we have kind of neutralised this. Any kind of fee whether or not cash, card, cheque and many others., takes place through our portal, and helps the owner get the segregated actual time status of the transactions in the fitness center. We have already implemented this within the diverse branches of Talwalkars and at the moment are in talks with the insurance businesses for the same.”
Growfitter has already partnered with Aditya Birla Health Insurance and has powered the Health & Wellness portal of ABHIL.
“The position we see for ourselves is one of a much-wished catalyst to expand the standard medical insurance panorama in India with the aid of focusing at the ‘fitness’ in ‘health insurance’ and reward the healthy behaviour through incentivising the efforts,” stated Mayank Bathwal, CEO, Aditya Birla Health Insurance Co. Limited.
The startup is likewise earning profits from its SaaS platform as well as on the commissions which it gets from promoting gymnasium memberships, with margins close to 7%-10%.
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The startup will deploy the raised price range towards improving its generation infrastructure. As stated by Harshit, “The biggest problem in India is human beings want to be suit however they do now not recognise how to begin and wherein to start. With the assist of system gaining knowledge of techniques, we're seeking to make a health recommendation device so one can assist health fanatics to recognise the system and attain their fitness goal efficaciously. At the same time, this can additionally help the purchasers and health centres to preserve tune of fitness history, even supposing the gyms got switched. This kind of records has not been available thus far in India.”
Health And Fitness Domain: Challenges And Plans Ahead
In phrases of Sanmati, the hardest undertaking for them in the preliminary phase became to apprehend the whole cost chain running in the fitness and fitness area. Space is basically fragmented and there may be a lack of infrastructure, and discounting seems to be a advertising method that also policies here.
However, in the course of their journey, they realised that pricing is not the ultimate key to client retention. One needs to transport in the direction of personalisation, getting an in-depth frame metric evaluation for the customers, if you want to offer them with a customised fitness regime.
“Health and Fitness enterprise is unorganized quarter and Growfitters is trying to create a robust monetary version for each carrier carriers and customers. The correct factor approximately them is that they've tried to recognize the complete surroundings of the industry by way of meeting fitness proprietors, running shoes, and purchasers,” stated Prashant Talwalkar, Promoter & CEO Talwalkars Better Value Fitness Limited.
