KFit, an Asia Pacific-based fitness-sharing platform to discover and reserve fitness activities, has secured a USD12 million Series A investment round led by Venturra Capital, with participation from SIG and Axiata Digital Innovation Fund.
Earlier investors, including Sequoia Capital India and 500 Startups, also participated.
KFit partners with studios and gyms, aggregating the supply of over 300,000 different activities every month. It then offers this wide selection to customers in one single, easy-to-use mobile app.
The new funding will enable KFit to expand in the region and invest in the technology, operations and marketing to further solidify its leading position in the Asia Pacific region. Their expansion will go beyond just fitness, with upcoming new categories, activities, and pricing models to be added this year.
The Series A round follows seed funding of USD3.25 million in July 2015 and pre-seed funding in April 2015. Since then, business has expanded at an accelerated rate with the number of active customers jumping 400%. In the last six months alone, KFit members have reserved over 250,000 reservations. A reservation is made every minute and customer ratings of KFit activities are at record high of 4.5/5 based on 10,000 reviews and 1.5 million ratings.
In the past six months, KFit has launched in Seoul, Taipei, Manila, Auckland and Perth, expanding its reach to 10 cities across the Asia Pacific region. The number of gyms and studios has surged five times to 5,000, with most of the notable gyms and fitness studios on board in each city.
Its hyper-local approach has flourished in areas with high population density and quality facilities. "At KFit, we've seen first-hand that staying active makes people happier and healthier. Our goal is to make it simple to build fitness and wellness into everyday life," says Joel Neoh, Founder of KFit. "The next phase of our expansion will see us bring even more exciting partners onto the platform, helping us transform our customers' health and lifestyle as they discover and enjoy great offline experiences across the Asia Pacific region", he said.
Working out should be an easy, fun and social experience. To enable that, the KFit team has been iterating fast around its technology to create the ultimate personalised and social fitness-sharing experience. New features (see call-out box) have resulted in a 4.4 rating across Google Play and App Store.
With the KFit platform, partnering gyms and studios can promote their brands and fill classes, making it simpler than ever to generate incremental revenue for their businesses. Stefan Jung at Venturra Capital said, "KFit created an enormous opportunity for gyms and studios to market their businesses to an engaged and active consumer base. They have truly redefined the fitness paradigm in Asia Pacific, by helping gyms and studios attract demand in a way that is affordable for members and sustainable for the businesses."
KFit is recognising and addressing the pain points in the large health, wellness and fitness industry. Pieter Kemps, on behalf of Sequoia Capital India, said, "Joel and the KFit team have executed extremely well in the last year and quickly emerged as the leading fitness platform for consumers in Asia Pacific. We continue to believe this segment has a big consumer pain point and traditional models of accessing fitness services and infrastructure can be improved upon using hyper-local discovery, demand-matching and on-demand scheduling. We are excited about the impact KFit can have on the fitness and wellness industry."
