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Virat kohli starts new venture Stepathlon to tackle fitness issues affecting kids

Fitness is the next rising industry in the startup space, given the amount of investor interest they are seeing both from celebrity cricketers and well-known entrepreneurs. Cricketer Virat Kohli on June 28 kicked off a new fitness venture in a joint venture with Stepathlon Lifestyle. The venture, called Stepathlon Kids, seeks to tackle fitness issues affecting kids by taking them through to a 30-day pedometer-based virtual race that will help increase awareness on health issues.

The new venture looks to reach 50,000 children in the first year of operations. “We will generate revenues from a combination of sponsorships, partnerships, licensing and merchandising for the medium to long term,” said Ravi Krishnan, CEO, Stepathlon Lifestyle. Last year, Virat Kohli invested around Rs 90 crore in Chisel Fitness, a Bengaluru-based fitness centre which recently announced plans to introduce technology-enabled, gamified workout routines and add 100 more centres in the next two years.

Former Myntra Co-Founder and Head of Flipkart Commerce platform Mukesh Bansal, who along with former colleague Ankit Nagori, is reportedly planning to launch his own startup in the fitness space backed Bengaluru-based fitness startup Cult.

A host of startups like Hobbyix, FlexiPass, Fitternity and Gympik have sprung up in the fitness space recently and most of them are focussed on moving away from the traditional gymming equipment based fitness centres.

They are making the industry much more efficient, both for consumers and trainers, by deploying technology to make services more personalised.

“There are two sets of startups in this space, both catering to consumers in urban India — those who are aggregating the growing number of gyms and yoga clinics in cities and those who are offering mobile-based fitness solutions to consumers who are not able to make it to gyms because of time constraints,” said Rutvik Doshi, Director at Inventus Capital, who along with Blume Ventures and IDG Ventures invested $6 million in Series-A funding into HealthifyMe.

Healthify-Me’s mobile application enables users to keep a track of their calories, set personal fitness goals and measure progress among myriad other lifestyle tracking parameters.

The app syncs with leading wearables including Fitbit, YuFit and MiBand along its own fitness band, RIST. Aggregators like Bangalore based Gympik is currently focused on tech enablement for gymming centres and are expanding their base of offerings.

Gympik, which claims to have enrolled about 20,000 fitness centres and 9,000 trainers on its platform, offers a cloud-based software and a personalised application both for trainers and consumers to track performance and fitness schedules, calculate calories burnt and provide basic health stats.

Source: The Economic Times

Image Courtesy: The Economic Times