CureFit: Building a new 'cult'

Bengaluru-based CureFit focuses on body, mind and food to make people healthy through its integrated service

In health and wellness start-up CureFit’s Bengaluru office, employees have a little competition going on among themselves to see who is the fittest. Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori, the founders, are proudly placed in the number one and two spots, respectively.
 
Practise what you preach, a phrase often lost among the top executives in companies, seems to resonate strongly among those at CureFit. The start-up,  focused on promoting healthier lifestyles among the masses, says where better to start than home.
 
Bansal, who founded online fashion start-up Myntra and sold it to Flipkart, and Nagori, who started as employee no 33 at Flipkart and rose to be its chief business officer, have been able to raise sufficient funds to run the capital-intensive business. Its investors — Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures — have put a combined $45 million in two rounds for the venture that has online and offline play.
 
Opportunity
 

Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal

India’s wellness and preventive health care market is expected to reach Rs 1.5 lakh crore by 2020, according to a January 2017 report by FICCI and E&Y, as more people look to take care of their health by taking up exercise or yoga and consuming healthy food. This market was  Rs 85,000 crore in 2015.
 

CureFit sees an opportunity to offer an integrated service — cult.fit for fitness, mind.fit for mental wellness and eat.fit for healthy food — to mid-level and senior executives who look at this to achieve more in their career or business. For this, it is setting up fully-equipped gyms, centres for mental wellness and kitchens that cook customised food for users. So far, Nagori says, there is no single player with an integrated offering to a person interested in improving his fitness.
 
“We are building an online and offline enterprise to offer physical fitness, mental wellness and health food in a vertically integrated manner where we own all the supply,” says Nagori. “We have started with one part of Bengaluru; we will expand market by market.”
 
Business model
 
Cult is its new playground — this is the push  the company is looking at to tap people with high-paying jobs who lead a sedentary lifestyle. Be it the start-up and IT crowd in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi or the financial and advertising industry analysts in Mumbai.
 
Unlike traditional gyms, Cult will have offline centres that will have a group class led by a trainer, who will nudge people to compete and play games with each other to achieve fitness. Food an d mental wellness comes as a package that will look at an individual holistically.
 
“We have a strong focus on building a training programme. Anyone who becomes a Cult trainer goes through four weeks of intense training and it’s likewise for chefs,” says Nagori. “What we want to turn it into is something aspirational. Athletes in schools and colleges should be looking to join us right after they’re done with their studies.”
 
With enough capital in hand, CureFit has acquired existing gyms — the Tribe Fitness Club, a1000Yoga and Kristys Kitchen — to get a head start. It has 16 offline centres in Bengaluru and plans to have 29 by the year-end. In October, a Cult centre will be opened in Gurgaon to target around 100 centres by 2018-end. It expects to serve close to 25,000 customers daily. It has signed up actor Hrithik Roshan as a brand ambassador. “This is a capex-heavy business but also very profitable. The capex payback for Cult is less than 12 months,” says Nagori. “Cult across the 16 centres is providing us free cash flow of over Rs 1 crore.”
 
Challenges
 
CureFit has started with a bang, starting with Bengaluru and looking to expand into other cities. For now, it offers a combination of a technology-enabled app that nudges people who have signed up for the programme to take up the offline fitness courses. It also looks at subscriptions that will provide a predictable revenue.  
 
Existing chains such as Talwalkars, Gold Gym and Snap Fitness, which have a huge customer base, could replicate the CultFit model, having established as brands themselves. “Cure.fit has certainly differentiated itself so far in all respects in a space which is not new so that is highly commendable. However, for it to be truly successful, it will call for a significant change in the attitude of urbane Indians on how they view personal fitness,” says Dinesh Goel, Bengaluru-based angel investor and start-up mentor.

 

Dinesh Goel, Bengaluru-based angel investor and start-up mentor

Expert take: Change in attitude towards personal fitness holds key
 
Cure.fit is on a mission to hook Indians to embrace fitness in their daily lives and its integrated approach, not just in terms of channels (online and offline), but also an amalgamation of related verticals across physical fitness, mental wellness and balanced diet should help in faster growth. More services are planned to be added in the near future, such as preventive health checks. Further, the start-up has been aggressive in execution. Instead of starting from scratch, it went on a shopping spree and acquired five companies. With the recent funding round, it estimates to achieve $100 million in revenue in a couple of years and a count of 500 Cult centres spread across 15 cities in five years from a mere 15 at this point in Bengaluru. However, for it to be truly successful, there has to be a change in the attitude of urbane Indians on how they view personal fitness. The growing incidence of lifestyle diseases and awareness of how these can be prevented offer hope for success of such platforms.