Fitness Startup Squats Acquires Minority Stake In Gym Aggregator Platform Fitato

Pune-based wellness and fitness startup Squats Fitness, on Tuesday (December 10), announced that it acquired a minority stake in gym aggregator platform Fitato in an ongoing Pre-Series A Round. Through this strategic partnership, Squats will be offering its users access to affordable and customised gym membership plans.

Jitendra Chouksey, the founder of Squats, in a press statement, said that this collaboration with Fitato’s will enable its community members of 520K to have easy access to gyms and fitness centres across India at a fixed monthly fee. The plans will be exclusively curated for the members based on their personal preferences. Fitato currently has more than 650 partners in its network.

Founded in January 2016, Squats was started by Chouksey as a fitness community platform on Facebook. With time, the company evolved into a full-fledged fitness company. This year, the company claimed to have generated a revenue of $ 1 Mn. The team reported 80% growth each quarter for the last two years, alongside a 45% retention rate. Recently, Squats was selected for Y Combinator — a US-based startup accelerator programme, which has helped companies like Airbnb, Cleartax, Dropbox among others.

Additionally, Squats has also developed a fitness app called Fittr, which was started in September 2018. Fittr offers its users a complete guide to support and mentor with more than 190+ consultants available at every step of fitness, health and lifestyle transformation. In 2015, Squats had raised $120K in seed funding. Earlier this year, Bollywood actor Suniel Shetty also invested an undisclosed amount in Squats. In 2017, the company was part of the FB-Start programme, an initiative by Facebook for early-stage ventures.

Globally, the wellness market is estimated to be at $4.2 Tn. The Indian wellness market is predicted to reach about INR 1.5 Tn by FY20. A lot of have wellness and fitness startups have emerged in the past few years, including Squats, Curefit, HealthifyMe, FitMeIn, and SARVA among others. The majority of these startups are backed by eminent venture capitalists, angel investors and celebrity investors.

Earlier this year, Mumbai-based fitness startup SARVA raised funding from Rajinikanth’s daughter, Aishwaryaa R. Dhanush. Increasing the glam ecosystem in the wellness and fitness ecosystem. Other celebrities such as Malaika Arora, Jennifer Lopez, Shahid Kapoor, Alex Rodriguez and Mira Kapoor have invested in SARVA.

In June 2019, Japanese investment firm SoftBank was reportedly in talks to invest in Indian fitness and wellness startup Curefit. If this happens, it will be the first healthtech-focused investment in India.