Montréal-based FLiiP has closed a $4.4-million seed round to bring its all-in-one fitness business software solution to more gym owners in North America and Europe.
Oss Ouahdi
“We come with industry expertise that we share on top of the software.”
FLiiP
The all-equity, all-primary round, which closed earlier this month, was led by St. Louis, Mo.-based Cultivation Capital with participation from Montréal-based Boreal Ventures and angel investors Jim Texier and Florent Cailliau.
Cultivation Capital general partner Timothy Stern is joining FLiiP’s board along with Boreal Ventures managing director David Charbonneau.
FLiiP offers a comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for fitness business management teams. It especially caters to multi-location commercial gyms that offer group classes for functional training, yoga and pilates, martial arts, or boxing.
The platform began as a tool for founder and CEO David Bourbonnière to manage his own gym, Club Athlétique SENS, in Saint-Basile-Le-Grand, Que. Juggling multiple software programs left Bourbonnière struggling to focus on customer satisfaction, he said. The owner created an initial version of the program in 2015 and shared it with local gym owners, but only began scaling it as a venture in 2020 after securing his first angel investment.
“FLiiP is focused on helping ambitious fitness leaders build thriving businesses with a platform thatʼs as intuitive as it is powerful,” Bourbonnière said in a statement.
The platform aims to “address the full lifecycle of a customer,” according to chief growth officer Oss Ouahdi, who formerly worked as head of go-to-market strategy at Lightspeed. FLiiP’s features include customer relationship management, embedded payments processing and internal payroll, and loyalty tools to retain existing customers. The company also claims the platform can track customer review data and churn rates, to assess who might be the right target for a well-timed promotion.
RELATED: Montréal-founded FightCamp launches Peloton-style boxing lessons in Canada
Ouahdi said that multiple team members other than Bourbonnière are former gym managers, including their head of product and some of the customer success team. “We come with industry expertise that we share on top of the software,” he said.
FLiiP plans to use the funding to expand further into the United States and enhance its product with artificial intelligence integrations to allow gym managers to quickly compile customer data trends through reports.
The fitness industry took a serious hit with the onset of the pandemic in 2020: Its Canadian revenue declined by over 30 percent year-over-year according to a market research report by RunRepeat. Though it has received a boost from the virtual health and wellness sector, the industry has not returned to its former high. It saw a negative annual compounded growth rate over the past five years, according to Blake McDonald, president of the fitness chain Orangetheory Canada.
Ouahdi told BetaKit that around 2020, private equity firms buying up smaller fitness tech providers created consolidation in the space.
“It sucked out innovation from the category, because now there aren’t that many players,” Ouahdi said. “As soon as there was a disruptive, innovative, smaller player in the market, they were exposed right away to a hostile acquisition.”
The available tech tools became an amalgamation of different acquired products and did not suit the needs of gym owners, he said.
Ouahdi said FLiiP can address this gap in the market, but knows it has competition. He pointed to California-based Mindbody as a main competitor, but said that FLiiP can serve its gym managers best because it sticks to one vertical, without veering into wellness or adjacent categories.
Client businesses in over 10 countries in North America and Europe use FLiiP’s platform, the company said, including Iron Bodyfit and Blackburn Athletics. FLiiP wants to quadruple its growth and aims to double its team of 30 over the next two years, but declined to share its annual recurring revenue or valuation.
Feature image courtesy Victor Freitas via Unsplash.