Healthcare start-up CureFit has bought Bengaluru-based yoga centre brand a1000yoga to expand its mental wellness offering.
Launched in 2011 by yoga teacher Pradeep Sattwmaya, a1000yoga has three yoga centres and 1,000 customers. Two of the three centres will be rebranded as Mind.Fit while the third will be converted into a Cult fitness centre.
The companies didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.
“Yoga is rising as one of the favoured wellness choices among our key target group. In mental wellness, we didn’t have an offline component. With a1000yoga we’ll be adding that as well. It fits into our strategy of offering an online-offline product,” CureFit co-founder Ankit Nagori said in an interview.
a1000yoga is CureFit’s third acquisition; it has already bought fitness centre brands Cult and Tribe since starting out last year.
With the latest acquisition, CureFit now has more than 10,000 customers.
CureFit is looking for more acquisitions, Nagori said.
“The reason we are doing acquisitions is that if we were a marketplace we would anyway have wanted all these vendors on our platform. But because we believe in a vertically integrated approach (or an inventory model) we are buying companies that fit into our philosophy,” Nagori said.
In May, CureFit (CureFit Healthcare Pvt. Ltd) launched its app in Bengaluru. The company aims to be the fitness hub for customers, so apart from offering subscriptions to Cult and yoga centres, it sells health food subscriptions and mental wellness content. CureFit will launch Cult and its app in Delhi in the December quarter.
There are three main components in its fitness business: Cult, Mind.fit (for mental wellness) and Eat.fit (health food).
Cult is the anchor for its business. In a 21 June interview, CureFit’s co-founder Mukesh Bansal said the company expects to have 30 Cult fitness centres in Bengaluru and Delhi by the end of the year from 10, and it plans to expand the brand to 500 centres over the next five years.
In Mind.fit, the company offers mental wellness content and with the addition of a1000yoga, it will introduce offline centres. For every five Cult centres, it will open one Mint.fit outlet, Nagori said.
In food, the firm delivers food from its own kitchens and is slowly expanding this business to more areas in Bengaluru. “It’s only been six weeks since we launched food and we are already doing 600 orders a day. This gives us a lot of confidence that our integrated approach is working well,” Nagori said.
Nagori and Bansal, former senior executives at Flipkart, started CureFit in March 2016 with $5 million of their own cash. The firm then raised $15 million last July in Series A capital from venture capital firms Kalaari Capital, Accel Partners and IDG Ventures— one of the largest early round funding ever by an Indian start-up.
In May, CureFit got another $3 million from some angel investors and UC-RNT Fund, a joint venture between the University of California and Ratan Tata’s RNT Associates.
Source: Mint