Cult.fit and the Rise of Fitness as a Lifestyle Category

Industry & Competitive Context

India’s organised fitness industry has historically been small relative to the size of its population. According to a 2025 report by Deloitte India and the Health & Fitness Association (HFA), the Indian fitness market was valued at approximately INR 16,200 crore (US$1.9 billion) in 2024 and is projected to grow to INR 37,700 crore (US$4.5 billion) by 2030, implying a compound annual growth rate of roughly 15%. The same report estimated that only 12.3 million Indians held fitness facility memberships in 2024, representing a membership penetration of just 0.8% of the population a figure the report expects to rise to only 1.7% by 2030. Of India’s 956 million people in the 18–62 age bracket, the report noted that a large majority remain physically inactive, underscoring how early-stage the formal fitness economy still is relative to other consumer categories.

The report also found that the top ten Indian cities generate 56% of market revenue while hosting only 31% of fitness facilities, pointing to significant metro concentration. Within the market, value gyms accounted for 56% of revenue and 80% of facilities in 2024, while boutique fitness formats (HIIT, yoga, MMA, Pilates, and similar) were identified as the fastest-growing segment, with a projected CAGR of 18.8% through 2030.

It is within this structurally underpenetrated but fast-growing market that Cult.fit (originally cure.fit) built its position. The company competed against a highly fragmented landscape of independent neighbourhood gyms, international franchise chains such as Gold’s Gym and Anytime Fitness, and, over time, a growing set of digital and at-home fitness entrants. Cult.fit’s strategic response to this fragmentation was to build an integrated, technology-enabled, multi-format fitness and wellness platform rather than compete as a single-format gym operator.

Brand Situation Prior to Repositioning

Cult.fit was founded in 2016 by Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori under the name cure.fit. Bansal had previously co-founded the fashion e-commerce company Myntra in 2007, which was acquired by Flipkart in 2014 for approximately $330 million; he subsequently served as Head of Commerce and Advertising at Flipkart before starting cure.fit with Nagori.

In its early years, cure.fit organised its offerings under a family of distinct sub-brands: cult.fit for group fitness centres, eat.fit for healthy food delivery, mind.fit for yoga and meditation, and care.fit for primary healthcare and diagnostics. While this architecture allowed the company to enter several adjacent categories simultaneously, it also meant the parent brand, cure.fit, carried less day-to-day consumer recognition than cult.fit, the name under which its flagship fitness centres and group workout classes operated.

In May 2021, the company formally renamed itself from cure.fit to cult.fit across its app, centres, and social media properties. Naresh Krishnaswamy, the company’s Growth and Marketing Head at the time, stated publicly that “the name ‘cult.fit’ has caught on with our users in a big way over the last few years” and that the company wanted “cult.fit to become the one destination people think of going to.” As part of this change, the company’s flagship unlimited-access membership product was renamed cultpass, intended to function as a single subscription covering access across the company’s various fitness formats and price tiers.

Strategic Objective

The rebrand and the broader brand-architecture consolidation that followed it reflected a clear strategic objective: to unify a multi-category portfolio of fitness, nutrition, mental wellness, and healthcare services under one consumer-facing brand name and one subscription product, rather than operate what consumers may have perceived as several loosely related services. Publicly disclosed statements from the company at the time of the rebrand indicate the goal was to concentrate brand equity in the name that already had the highest consumer recall (cult.fit) and to use a unified membership pass (cultpass) as the primary vehicle for cross-selling across formats.

Beyond brand consolidation, the company’s acquisition activity in the years following the rebrand points to a second strategic objective: building vertical control over its hardware and supply chain in the at-home and D2C fitness equipment space, rather than relying solely on in-centre, studio-based fitness delivery.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

The execution of this strategy took two documented forms: brand and product consolidation, and inorganic expansion through acquisitions.

On brand and product consolidation, the company merged what had previously been separately branded services cure.fit as the parent, with cult.fit, eat.fit, mind.fit, and care.fit as sub-brands into a single cult.fit identity, with cultpass as the unified membership product spanning multiple access tiers and formats.

On inorganic expansion, Cult.fit undertook a series of acquisitions to build out its own equipment and apparel portfolio. In December 2021, it acquired four at-home fitness equipment and accessory brands RPM Fitness, Fitkit, Onefitplus (cardio equipment brands), and Urban Terrain (a bicycle brand) from Shoora Retail, with the company’s entire team joining Cult.fit as part of the transaction. The deal value was not publicly disclosed. Shamik Sharma, then Head of Digital Health at Cult.fit, stated that the acquisitions would “enhance our product portfolio of at-home smart exercise equipment,” with the company’s at-home equipment pricing then ranging from roughly INR 5,000–7,000 for entry-level air bikes to around INR 50,000 for its premium branded bike. The company stated that the Urban Terrain deal gave it bicycle manufacturing capability and a service network spanning more than 19,000 pin codes, and that the consolidation was intended to support end-to-end supply chain control and margin management.

In February 2022, Cult.fit acquired a majority stake in F2 Fun & Fitness India Pvt Ltd, becoming the master franchise partner for the Gold’s Gym brand in India and several neighbouring markets (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, and Bhutan). At the time of the deal, Cult.fit operated more than 350 owned and partnered centres across over 25 Indian cities, while Gold’s Gym operated more than 140 outlets. Deal value was not publicly disclosed. Nikhil Kakkar, then COO of Gold’s Gym, stated the companies had “a mission to touch 200 clubs in 24 months,” while Krishnaswamy described the goal as building “immense value into the fitness ecosystem.” The stated rationale for this deal combined geographic and format expansion (non-metro and smaller-town penetration via franchising) with brand-portfolio breadth, since Gold’s Gym operated under a distinct, internationally recognised identity rather than being folded into the cult.fit brand itself.

Separately, the company also developed Cultsport, its in-house sportswear and fitness apparel brand, extending its owned-brand strategy from equipment into apparel, alongside Cultfit Healthcare as a distinct line of business.

The company’s capital structure through this period was funded by a series of institutional financing rounds. Publicly reported investors across its funding history include Accel, Temasek (through entities such as MacRitchie Investments), Tata Digital, Kalaari Capital, and Zomato (now Eternal). In November 2021, the company then still widely referred to by its Curefit entity name — was reported to have reached unicorn status at a valuation of $1.5 billion, following a round in which Zomato invested $50 million in cash as part of a roughly $100 million transaction; Zomato separately acquired the company’s sports-facilities business, Fitso, for $50 million and held a 6.4% stake. The company had separately raised $75 million from Tata Digital in June 2021. Cumulative funding raised by the company has been reported by industry trackers at over $675 million, though this cumulative figure comes from third-party aggregation rather than a single company disclosure.

Positioning & Consumer Insight

The consumer insight underlying Cult.fit’s brand architecture can be read directly from the company’s own public statements at the time of its 2021 rebrand: that “cult.fit” as a name had already achieved stronger organic recognition among users than “cure.fit,” the original parent brand. Rather than invest in building awareness for a newly coined master brand, the company chose to consolidate its portfolio under the name that had already demonstrated the strongest pull with consumers, and to extend that recognition to a single, simplified subscription product (cultpass) spanning multiple fitness formats and access levels.

This positioning choice organising the brand around a single membership construct rather than a collection of discrete services is consistent with a strategy of presenting fitness, previously transactional and centre-specific, as a broader lifestyle subscription. No company-published consumer research, brand-tracking study, or market survey substantiating specific consumer attitudes toward fitness as a “lifestyle category” was identified in public sources reviewed for this case; the positioning rationale here is limited to the statements the company itself made publicly at the time of the rebrand.

Media & Channel Strategy

The company’s FY25 regulatory filings, as reported by Entrackr, disclose an “advertising and promotion” expense line of Rs 202.9 crore, described as flat year-over-year, but no further breakdown of this spend by channel, campaign, or medium is publicly available. Accordingly, this case cannot characterise the company’s media or channel strategy beyond this single disclosed expense figure.

Business & Brand Outcomes

Cult.fit’s financial performance in the years following its brand consolidation and acquisition activity has been documented through regulatory filings reported by financial media outlets such as Entrackr, which track filings made with India’s Registrar of Companies (RoC).

For the fiscal year ended March 2023 (FY23), the company’s operating revenue was reported at Rs 694 crore, with a loss of Rs 534 crore. For FY24, operating revenue rose to Rs 927 crore (a year-over-year increase of roughly 34%), with the loss reported at approximately Rs 535 crore effectively flat versus the prior year. This FY24 loss figure excluded a goodwill impairment charge of Rs 333 crore (compared to Rs 70 crore in FY23), which was reported separately from the company’s core operating expense analysis.

For FY25, operating revenue rose further to Rs 1,215.5 crore, a year-over-year increase of more than 31%, with total revenue including other income reported at Rs 1,272 crore. Net loss for FY25 was reported at Rs 480.8 crore, a reduction of roughly 10% from the prior year. EBITDA for FY25 was reported as a loss of Rs 189 crore, representing an EBITDA margin of approximately -15.5%, with a reported Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) of -24.02%. Total expenses for FY25 were reported at Rs 1,751.6 crore, with cost of materials (Rs 521.5 crore) as the largest single line item, followed by employee benefit costs (Rs 347.4 crore, including Rs 99.5 crore in ESOP expenses), advertising and promotion (Rs 202.9 crore), and depreciation and amortisation (Rs 237.6 crore). By revenue line, fitness subscriptions (spanning cultpass, cult.fit centres, and platform services) contributed Rs 889 crore, or roughly 73% of FY25 revenue, up 32.7% year-over-year, while product sales (sportswear and fitness equipment, including Cultsport) contributed Rs 326.4 crore, up 27%.

In 2026, Cult.fit filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) for a proposed initial public offering, comprising a fresh issue of up to Rs 950 crore combined with an offer for sale of up to 17.86 crore equity shares by existing shareholders, including Temasek’s MacRitchie Investments, Tata Digital, Accel, and Kalaari Capital. The DRHP disclosed that the company’s net loss had narrowed further to Rs 251.9 crore for FY26, with a reported positive adjusted EBITDA of Rs 144.8 crore for that year, though the company had not yet achieved net profitability at the time of filing. The DRHP also disclosed that Cultsport and Cultfit Healthcare, as individual business lines, had each posted losses in the range of roughly Rs 18–33 crore across FY24–FY26. It further disclosed that four metro markets (Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad) generated 90.44% of fitness services revenue in FY26, up from 85.5% in FY24, and that franchised and marketplace gyms made up 69.21% of the company’s total fitness centres in FY26. The filing also disclosed statutory auditor observations regarding data control processes at premium centres for FY24–FY26, including gaps in daily sales book backups and limited ability to verify audit trails in third-party point-of-sale systems used by some centres, which the company stated it expects to resolve by FY27, as well as disclosed delays in certain statutory payments (provident fund, ESI, TDS, and GST) during the FY24–FY26 period, and pending litigation of approximately Rs 55 crore against subsidiaries and approximately Rs 488 crore against company directors.

Strategic Implications

Several strategic patterns emerge from Cult.fit’s documented history that are relevant to analysing how a category-defining consumer brand is built and sustained in a nascent, underpenetrated market.

First, the company’s 2021 rebrand illustrates a deliberate choice to let bottom-up consumer usage determine top-down brand architecture, rather than imposing a master-brand structure from the outset and hoping sub-brands would align beneath it. The company’s own public rationale that “cult.fit” had organically outgrown “cure.fit” in consumer mindshare suggests that in fast-growing, high-engagement categories, brand architecture decisions may be better made reactively, informed by observed usage patterns, than planned purely in advance.

Second, the sequence and nature of the company’s acquisitions at-home equipment brands in 2021, followed by a master franchise agreement for an established international gym brand in 2022 indicate an attempt to combine vertical integration (controlling equipment supply and manufacturing) with horizontal format expansion (adding a differently branded, non-metro-oriented gym chain) under a single parent entity. This dual approach reflects the structural reality of the Indian fitness market identified in industry reports: a market still dominated by value-tier, non-metro growth potential, alongside opportunities in hardware/product categories that extend fitness consumption into the home.

Third, the financial trajectory disclosed across FY23 through the FY26 DRHP filing revenue growing consistently in the 30%-plus range annually while losses narrowed from roughly Rs 534–535 crore to Rs 251.9 crore, alongside a shift to positive adjusted EBITDA in FY26 suggests a business that scaled first and pursued unit economics discipline later, a sequencing choice common among venture-funded consumer platforms pursuing category leadership ahead of profitability. The persistence of losses over multiple fiscal years, even as revenue scaled meaningfully, highlights the capital intensity of building physical, centre-based fitness infrastructure compared to a purely digital or asset-light model.

Fourth, the DRHP’s disclosure of heavy metro revenue concentration (over 90% of fitness services revenue from four cities in FY26) stands in some tension with the company’s franchise-led, non-metro expansion ambitions stated publicly at the time of the Gold’s Gym deal in 2022. This suggests that while franchising may be an effective mechanism for extending physical footprint into smaller cities, converting that footprint into a proportionate share of revenue remains a documented, ongoing challenge for the company as of its most recent public filing.

Finally, the auditor-flagged data control and statutory compliance observations disclosed in the DRHP are a reminder that rapid, acquisition-led, multi-format scaling spanning owned centres, franchised centres, and marketplace partners operating on different point-of-sale systems carries real governance and reporting complexity, a consideration directly relevant to how the company’s expansion strategy will need to evolve ahead of or following a public listing.

Discussion Questions

1. What are the strategic trade-offs between consolidating a multi-category platform (fitness, food, mental wellness, healthcare) under a single consumer brand name versus maintaining distinct sub-brands for each category, and under what market conditions does each approach create more value?

2. Cult.fit pursued both vertical integration (acquiring equipment and apparel manufacturers) and horizontal expansion (the Gold’s Gym franchise partnership) within a short period. How should a company sequence and prioritise these two types of inorganic growth when operating with constrained capital in a loss-making business?

3. Given that four metro cities generated over 90% of Cult.fit’s fitness services revenue in FY26 despite a franchise-heavy non-metro expansion strategy, what factors might explain the gap between physical footprint expansion and revenue contribution from non-metro markets, and what strategic levers could address this gap?

4. Cult.fit’s revenue grew by more than 30% annually across FY24 and FY25 while losses narrowed only gradually until FY26. What does this trajectory suggest about the capital intensity and operating leverage of a physical, centre-based fitness business model compared to asset-light digital platforms?

5. The company’s DRHP disclosed auditor observations about data control weaknesses across owned, franchised, and marketplace-operated centres. What governance and systems challenges typically arise when a company scales through a mixed ownership model (owned, franchised, and partner-operated locations), and how might these be mitigated ahead of an IPO?