Exclusive: Saha Fund, Exfinity, others to back online fitness discovery platform Fitternity

Online fitness discovery platform Fitternity has received commitment to raise fresh investment from existing investors women-focused Saha Fund, Exfinity Venture Partners and couple of other angel investors based out of India and Silicon Valley, according to a person privy to the development.

"It has received commitment worth under $2 million," said the person mentioned above on the condition of anonymity, without disclosing more details about the investors.

The startup will use the funds for deploying capital to add new business verticals to sports, diet plans and preventive healthcare. A part of investment will also go for marketing and brand building.

The Mumbai-based platform follows a marketplace model and enables users to purchase sessions or membership of different fitness programmes, including gym sessions, yoga and Zumba classes and personal trainers, among others. Besides, it allows users to take trial classes of various programmes.

Fitternity Health E-solution Pvt. Ltd. which runs Fitternity was founded in 2013 by Neha Motwani. A management student from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics, Neha earlier worked as a consultant at Aon Hewitt, the global talent, retirement and health solutions business of Aon plc before starting up her own venture.

The firm, which has a user base of 1.25 lakh, claims to have joined hands with more than 5,000 partners comprising gyms, healthy food providers and studios.

Fitternity has listed over 12,500 centres in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune since its inception.

Separate email queries sent to Fitternity, Saha Fund and Exfinity did not elicit any response at the time of filing this story.

Last year, the startup raised Rs 6.3 crore ($1 million) from Exfinity Venture Partners, a Rs 125 crore-fund promoted by IT industry veterans, including TV Mohandas Pai, V Balakrishnan, Girish Paranjpe and Deepak Ghaisas.

The firm is also in talks with various VC firms to raise about $5 million in Series A round of funding, the person cited above said.

Earlier this year, former Flipkart executives Ankit Nagori and Mukesh Bansal's online preventive healthcare platform Curefit raised $15 million in a Series A round of funding from Accel Partners, IDG Ventures and Kalaari Capital.

In June, Fitness startup BookYourGame, run by Bookyourgym Fitness Pvt. Ltd, raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a round led by Sanjay Verma, former chief executive officer, Cushman & Wakefield, Asia Pacific; and Amit Khanna, managing partner, Antuit-Europe.

In March, Gympik.com raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A funding from RoundGlass Partners. Last September, FitMeIn secured $100,000 in seed funding from Green House Ventures.

Saha Fund, which was launched in October 2015, is India's first venture capital fund approved by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) that is focused on businesses run by women entrepreneurs.

The fund also invests in companies with women in senior management, firms that make products and services aimed at women and companies with over 50% female workforce.

The fund is targeting an initial corpus Rs 100 crore, of which it has raised Rs 80 crore. It has added seven companies to its portfolio, five of which have gone public.

Exfinity invests in technology firms through Exfinity Technology Fund – Series I, a fund which has a corpus of Rs 125 crore. In India, it has put money in Bengaluru-based Riversilica Technologies, a firm that builds solutions for IP-streaming video delivery; Mad Street Den, a Chennai-based computer vision and artificial intelligence company; and a local subsidiary of US-based digital connectivity firm Uniken.

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