With 150 fitness centres, Oyofit raises an angel round to help enterprises beat the bulge

Tuesday April 19, 2016 , 5 min Read

Healthy employees are generally more productive. Research has proven that mental prowess is directly linked to our physical prowess. There is also evidence suggesting that exercise during regular work hours boosts performance.

Oyofit, a startup in the fitness space, aims to help employees, startups, enterprises, and fitness centres make more efficient use of their time and capital and track ROI. The startup recently raised an undisclosed angel round from RN Agarwal, MD of Wep Peripherals (in his personal capacity).

Story so far

Oyofit was started in September 2015 by IIT-Roorkee computer science graduates Shivank Agarwal, who is the CEO, and Ruchir Garg, who is the CTO. The team grew to six members when Naveen Agrawal, Ashish Agrawal, Aditi Sharma and Bala Kuma came onboard.

Prior to this, Shivank had worked with startups like Winshuttle, Vedantu, and Kabloom; he had also started up on his own with BufferInfinite, an online video subtitling service. Ruchir has worked for companies like Amazon and Ibibo.

YourStory-Oyofit-4 — Oyofit initially started out as a listing platform in January 2015, positioned as a marketing channel for their partner networks. However, based on customer feedback, the team quickly realised that pain-points such as annual contract lock-in, under-utilisation of services, and non-standardisation of services were not being addressed properly at fitness centres and gyms. **So they decided to modify their offering based on these inputs.**

Currently positioned as an aggregator and ‘a personal trainer’ for both enterprises and individuals, Oyofit operates in Bengaluru, and nearly 150 fitness clubs in the city have come onboard offering around 30 fitness activities. Some of their partners include Gold's Gym, Contours, a1000yoga, The Workouts, Fitness One, and Pluto Fitness.

While the individual (B2C) component has been active since inception, their corporate package was launched recently in February 2016. Currently, 10 startups and enterprises including- DreamOrbit, HackerRank, AirRescue, MoveInSync, FxCart, HackerEarth, RazorPay, Jet Airways, Furlenco and HomeLane have signed up with them.

How it works

Enterprises who sign up as employer partners work with OYO Fit to finalise the engagement model. The price point varies from Rs 1,000-1,500 per month depending on the number of employees who sign up for the process. Oyofit lets the enterprise decide if they will foot the entire bill or let the employees pay, while they contribute a certain percentage.

While onboarding a new company onto their platform, Oyofit starts off by requesting interested employees to fill a survey over email and then conducts a complimentary BMI Test session with a fitness trainer and dietitian for all the employees at the employer’s office.

After the session, interested employees can download Oyofit’s mobile app, register using their official mail ID and get access to all the partnered fitness centres and services. Oyofit offers employers access to an employee dashboard, where they can track the employees’ fitness activities and how they are using the facility.

USPs and sector overview

YourStory-Oyofit-3 — Oyofit competes with other fitness aggregators, and indirectly with gyms, but it aims to stand out with some unique offerings. **Oyofit’s mobile app includes a workout guide to help users reduce dependency on costly personal trainers.**

Shivank reiterated that with Oyofit, users get access to multiple fitness clubs and activities and are hence not bound to one gym or activity. He said

You can learn or sign up for a new activity every week (or) every day and choose the fitness activity you want for the day. This reduces the probability of you dropping out from your gym as you are constantly engaged.

With high dropout rates and expensive annual membership fees, many gyms and fitness centres face multiple challenges managing their inventory. In the last few years, many startups have put their foot forward to solve some of these issues.

Active in multiple cities in the US, and a few locations around the world, Classpass, which recently raised a $30 million series C round is one of the most well-known players in this space. It offers monthly memberships to gyms and fitness centres in their network.

Closer home, in India, we have Gympik, which recently raised a seed round from Round glass partners and also acquired its competitor, Fitness Papa in September 2015. Fitternity recently crossed 65,000 users and raised $1 million in funding led by Exfinity VP in 2015. Orobind was recently acquired by Housejoy. Other players in this space are Fitraq, Classverse, Flexipass, and Gymer (which provides workout sessions on hourly basis).

Future plans

Oyofit will utilise the funds raised to scale up both technology and operations. Shivank said,

We will be scaling our tech team to launch APIs that will be used by diet food providers and medical service providers and also for developing live inventory management software for sports clubs. The new Operations team will be utilised to onboard sports clubs, of which we have limited inventory.

Shivank says that they are currently seeing good traction for activities like yoga, Zumba and are also seeing growing interest in sports activities like swimming. While Oyofit caters to both corporates (B2B) and individuals (B2C), currently around 80 per cent of its bookings are corporate. Going forward, they aim to focus more on corporates and startups.

Currently available only for Android users, Oyofit is in the process of releasing an iOS app and estimates that it will be launched in the first week of May. Shivank also spoke about an upcoming feature ‘Corporate User Group (CUG)’ through which employees can extend their ‘wellness solution’ to a family member at no extra cost. A user will be able to add one dependent, who is verified and identified through email and other ID proof. For 2016, Oyofit plans to capture the Bengaluru market and then expand to nearby markets like Hyderabad.

You can download the Android app here and visit their website here.

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