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At some point in 2024, somebody on Enhance’s board let out an involuntary giggle when CEO Tarek Mounir told them the company was expanding to America.
Mounir, unsurprisingly, wouldn’t volunteer who it was when pressed, other than to clarify, with some loyalty, that it wasn’t anyone at Global Ventures.
The sceptic in question has since eaten a little humble pie.
Enhance recently raised $18.2 million in a mix of equity and venture debt from Global Ventures and Stride Asset Management, partly to accelerate the international expansion that once elicited the laugh.
“They were happy to come back and say, ‘Well, I’m very happy you proved me wrong on that one.’”
Dubai-born Enhance had spent since 2018 building software to operate its own personal-training business across the Gulf, and the American expansion began less as some grand strategic push than an exercise in curiosity.
Mounir wanted to understand what the mature version of that software looked like elsewhere, and the Health & Fitness Association conference seemed as obvious a place as any to find out.
America had much larger gym chains, much deeper software markets and, presumably, somebody who had already solved the problem at enterprise scale.
Instead, operators walking the conference floor began asking whether they could buy Enhance’s.
“These gym operators looked at our software and said, ‘There’s nothing like this on the market. We’d love to onboard you.’” Crunch Fitness, UFC Gym and In-Shape were among the names Mounir says subsequently showed interest.
The discovery sent Enhance into a mildly disorientating reversal. It had gone stateside looking for the company it could learn from and discovered, at least in this narrow corner of the fitness industry, that it might already have built the thing itself.
“I’d be lying if I told you I was the visionary who figured it out back in 2018,” Mounir says. “We thought it was a local problem. It was very pleasantly surprising to figure out, ‘Oh, we solved a global problem.’”
The company’s path to that discovery was necessarily circuitous because the software emerged from operating the business rather than being designed in the abstract.
Trainers had to be scheduled, clients retained, sessions recorded, payroll reconciled and managers given some way of understanding whether a personal-training operation spread across multiple locations was actually functioning as intended. The product accumulated naturally around those problems.
For a long time, regional investors didn't necessarily regard that as an advantage.
Mounir remembers presenting Enhance’s model to prospective backers and repeatedly being asked who had done it before. His answer, as far as he knew, was nobody, which was often enough to end the conversation. “If it was deemed to be successful, somebody in the US would’ve done it,” is how he remembers the logic.
For investors more accustomed to the Rocket Internet school of importing proven models, that was a difficult gap to bridge.
Which makes what happened next rather ironic. The US, once invoked as evidence that Enhance’s model probably shouldn’t work, is now the market helping validate it.
Fitness software is hardly a category suffering from scarcity. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, conveniently also seemingly the names of a disproportionate number of veneered English PTs, appears to have an app…
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