Bengaluru, Pune to house tech-backed fitness incubator program

Functional Fitness Studio Brand MultiFit Wellness Private Limited recently unveiled India's first gym chain-driven fitness incubator program called MultiFit Fitness Incubator Program (MFIP). To be housed out of its Bangalore and Pune facilities, the program will be a healthy mix of technology-based start-ups and ideas as well as conventional ones across sports, fitness, wellness, and nutrition.

MultiFit has revealed that the company has already commenced incubation of a Fitness CRM, Nutrition program Fitsperts and MMA Academy MultiFit MMA Pro-Academy - all to be commercially launched over the next three-four months. Having started off as a 3000 sq. ft. single studio in 2015, MultiFit currently operates a chain of over 32 large format multi-disciplinary Functional Fitness studios across India, UK & UAE marking a presence in 10 cities. Further, it has another 20 more signed up gyms which are slated to go live over the next 4-5 months taking the total count to 52 fitness studios.

Dr. Samir Kapoor, Founder & MD, MultiFit opines that the fitness business is changing extremely rapidly, driven not just by technology but by the fast-changing socio-economic landscape of the country. Bringing out a statistical co-relation, Dr. Kapoor factually explains that over 75-80% of all mortality in the country will be driven by non-communicable diseases (NCDs) by 2020 and it is technology like Machine Learning/AI can transform and disrupt effective solutions to curb the diseases.

Responding to the question posed to Dr. Kapoor by Voice&Data bureau on how AI/Machine Learning will transform fitness solutions, he said, “The Human Body is a very amazing being. No two bodies are the same and hence no two individuals can have the same fitness or nutrition regimes. A lot depends on what body type you are - Strength or Endurance, whether your body follows a morning clock or an evening clock type, what is your recovery time and most importantly your tolerance levels to various foods and intakes. While if you have a boutique or a small operation it is still possible to give highly tailored customized regimes to ensure maximum success, but then if you want to do this at a large commercial level it becomes very challenging both at the financial sustainability as well as resourcing and time levels. Technology through predictive analysis and eventually AI driven fitness bots is the ideal solution for this challenge.”

He further added, “While this is on the pure fitness and nutrition level, technology is not only disrupting this side of the industry but through Machine learning, we are today being able to trend map and deploy predictive analysis across the entire spectrum of the industry on a real-time basis. The impact of this is tremendous, not just enabling players in the space to rapidly alter their towlines and bottom-lines but also enabling rapid scalability taking the solutions to millions near instantaneously and resulting in far superior customer stories.”

Hence, Dr. Kapoor says launching the fitness incubator program was thus imperative. Through this program, the incubator aims at tapping into all the brilliant ideas that come up on a day-to-day basis across the country but lack the financial and business experience to take it forward.

The MultiFit incubator will house innovative scalable ideas that address both the existing and latent needs of the ever-discerning customer in the fitness, sports as well as larger wellness space. The important part to note here is that these business ideas could be both conventional real physical world and/or technology driven, says Dr. Kapoor.

“Once a start-up idea goes through the program’s extensive selection process and gets selected, the incubator intends to provide the start-up with all the support they require, be it management incubation, support service assistance, financial backing and most importantly a significant and ready market for their product/service,” assures Dr. Kapoor.

Assisting MultiFit in this endeavor would also be its newly inducted Technical Advisory Board comprising 11 International Olympic Athletes including Andy Turner, Marilyn Okoro, Chris Tomlinson, Sarah Stevenson, Mark Lewis Francis, Sebastian Rodger, Zoe Smith, Alyson Dixon, Georgina Cassar, Luke Lennon Ford, and Manoj Pingle.