Healthcare startup Cure.fit has acquired the India business of international fitness chain Fitness First. Oaktree Capital that owns Fitness First will come on the board of Cult, Cure.fit’s fitness subsidiary. The American asset management firm will also pump in more money in the consolidated business. Fitness First will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cult.fit.
Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan, who is the brand ambassador of Cure.Fit and also has a stake in the company, has also invested a few crores in the startup.
Mukesh Bansal might has moved from the world of fashion into health and fitness and it seems to be logical extension of the entrepreneur’s personality. He gets up at 5 a.m. every morning and hits the gym for over an hour with a fitness regime that includes everything from cardio exercises and weights to yoga and meditation.
“Fitness is the source of my energy. To run a startup you need a lot of energy and rigour; my daily fitness regime gives me that focus. I can dea-l with any kind of work stress,” says Bansal. Our interest in fitness has helped us a lot in building Cure.fit. We are deeply involved in product building because of our passion for fitness and sports. It makes us very handson with the product that we are offering to customers,” says Mukesh Bansal.
The computer science graduate from IIT, Kanpur worked for Silicon Valley startups for eight years before he built one of India’s largest online fashion portals (Myntra) which he sold to Flipkart.
Cure.fit signs Rs 1-bn partnership with Hrithik’s HRX
- Curefit announced its Rs 1 billion partnership with Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan, who will promote Curefit through his brand, HRX.
- Hrithik’s signature workout ‘HRX Workout’, designed by him along with his personal trainer under his brand HRX, is available exclusively at all CULT centers and eventually will be made available on the Cure.fit mobile app.
- As part of Curefit’s expansion plans, Curefit to add 500 new CULT outlets
Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan, who was signed as the brand ambassador of fitness startup Cure.Fit last year and also picked up a small stake in the firm, has now turned investor in the Startup.
Hrithik as invested close to Rs 6 crore in Cure.fit. The funds have been routed through his firm Extreme Brands as well as by him as an individual investor.
Last year, Cure.fit had signed Hrithik Roshan as its brand ambassador.
The five-year association, valued at Rs 100 crore, included the actor’s equity stake in the company (in lieu of cash investment), promotions and royalty from his personal brand HRX’s specialised workout plan, which is being promoted across Cult fitness centres operated by Cure.fit.
HRX Workout offering, also to be launched as mobile app, is expected to rake in Rs 250-crore annual business in the coming years.
“The idea behind this workout is to help people move better, faster and feel athletic by progressing gradually. Since its introduction the response to the HRX Workout (at Cult fitness centers) has been welcoming with an ever increasing roster of participants. We are delighted with this initial response and it also gives us great confidence to look at reaching out to newer markets and further the HRX vision through this partnership,” said Hrithik Roshan, founder HRX.
With CureFit, Mukesh Bansal wants to jumpstart a fitness movement in India
Bangalore-based healthcare and fitness start-up CureFit was founded by former Flipkart executives Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori. Nagori and Bansal were two of the senior-most executives at Flipkart before they resigned to start Curefit.
Cure Fit Healthcare provides services such as fitness advice and medicine deliveries through a mix of online and offline channels. Today the startup has four products under the Cure.fit platform: Cult.fit, a chain of premium fitness centres; Eat.fit, an online health food delivery service; Mind.fit, a provider of online-offline mental health and wellness services such as meditation and yoga; and Care.fit, which provides online-offline services in primary healthcare.
Curefit Healthcare – Introduction
“We all go out for sports every week, we do yoga sessions. When a new employee joins they are given a Fitbit and we strongly recommend that everyone do 10,000 steps every day. The point is to consume the product you’re building. These things are what we will be recommending to our customers,” said Nagori (co-founder of CureFit).
“Healthcare can be broadly divided into prevention and cure. For the first few years we will be focusing on the prevention part of healthcare, and later we’ll pursue the cure side. Prevention has four important parts: eating healthy, active lifestyle, mental wellness, regular health check-ups. We will be launching fitness, mental wellness—DIY (do-it-yourself) packs of yoga and meditation—and food when we launch our app within the next three months,” Nagori.
Curefit acquired online health-food delivery company Kristys Kitchen and also bought a majority stake in fitness centre chain ‘The Tribe’, in a bid to expand its footprint in the offline market. Shwetambari Shetty, co-founder of The Tribe fitness centres, joined CureFit’s management team. CureFit had bought Bengaluru-based fitness centre brand Cult last year.
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