Tech
EGYM, a connected fitness startup conceived after the founder hit a wall at the gym, lands $200M at a $1.2B+ valuation
Getting healthy is big business these days. Now a startup that’s come up with a unique approach leveraging tech to help people with their exercise regimes is announcing a big round of funding, putting some weight behind its own push for growth.
Munich-based EGYM — a maker of connected fitness equipment and personalized training tech that has also built out a fitness marketplace between gyms and corporate wellness programs — has closed a Series G round of just over $200 million from L Catterton and Meritech, both new backers of the startup.
The funding is coming in at a post-money valuation of more than $1.2 billion, CEO and founder Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer confirmed to TechCrunch in an interview, and it will be used in a couple of key areas. The company wants to drive more business in its newest markets, the U.K. and the U.S., where it has respectively acquired two smaller companies, Hussle and FitReserve. It also wants to continue building out an AI-based assistant, called Genius, that it launched earlier this year. Despite the hype around AI, Genius is no AI gimmick, Roesch-Schlanderer said.
“I don’t really have an opinion about the broader AI world, but what I can tell you is, in our field, it adds huge value to making sure that people have always the best possible workout at their fingertips based on past success, their behaviors, their goals.” Only around 10% of gym goers have access to personal trainers, making the AI trainer a practical alternative, he added.
Roesch-Schlanderer founded EGYM after his own frustrations with gyms and working out.
Nearly 200 million people around the world stay in shape by working out at gyms. Roesch-Schlanderer also wanted to get in shape, but he found himself at an impasse. If you don’t already go to the gym and work out regularly, chances are you don’t quite know where to begin. And even people who do go regularly don’t have a lot of data about what they could be doing better or differently to avoid getting hurt.
With those gaps in mind, EGYM built a series of connected workout stations that help track what users are doing, leaning on apps to help them track their activity both on EGYM equipment and, using data from wearables, wherever they happen to be breaking a sweat. Initially, EGYM contracted with gyms to sell the equipment, and then later with companies building out company wellness plans to get their employees using that equipment. The whole model is based around B2B2C: No direct-to-consumer plans are in the works.
The formula has been a big success. Roesch-Schlanderer said the company is profitable on an EBITDA basis, and expects to generate $500 million in revenues in 2025.
The company today says that its corporate network operation, Wellpass, has 17,000 sports partners (that is, gyms), 14,000 corporate customers, and 3 million “eligible” employees. (As a point of comparison, when EGYM last raised funding — $225 million in July 2023 — it had 2.5 million users on Wellpass.) Overall, some 18,000 fitness and health centers use EGYM machines and services, working out to some 6 million people using EGYM’s products monthly. Now around 75% of the business is subscription-based, and the remaining 25% is focused around its equipment, he said. “The corporate subscription market is bigger than gym tech but the gym tech is what creates the value,” said Roesch-Schlanderer.
Roesch-Schlanderer is tapping into a rising trend. The world is slowly coming around to the idea of preventative healthcare, looking at better ways of identifying what might go wrong and what to do to avoid that, before it gets too late and your options have dwindled down to cocktails of medication, operations, and a lot of expensive doctor visits.
Companies like Neko Health — the startup co-founded by Daniel Ek — are building clinics that scan customers’ bodies and combines that with AI algorithms to provide a wide range of diagnostics about the state of users’ health so consumers get a better grip on the state of their health. Others are exploring what role the microbiome might play in our health regimes. Fitness is shaping up to be a core part of that proposition.
Nevertheless, the size of the investment is notable given that we are still seeing a dearth of growth rounds in Europe, particularly for companies that are not focused on AI.
The AI play at EGYM, launched earlier this year, is still new and in progress. Asked about which models it uses, the company told me, “EGYM Genius is based on a set of machine learning models that are tailored to the specific problems of the ‘workout’ domain. So Genius is not based on any of the big large language models, but rather on a set of models that has been specifically tailored and trained based on the many years of workout data that EGYM has collected. This allows us to combine the power of deep learning models with advantages of other machine learning methods that e.g. provide more explainability than LLMs.”
Roesch-Schlanderer said that he was proactively getting approached for another round as soon as the previous one was announced.
“We had enough cash to survive another COVID,” he told TechCrunch. COVID-19, and being able to survive something like it, figures big in his mind, because the company nearly collapsed during the pandemic.
However, given that he was getting a lot of inbound interest, he decided to use the moment to find what he described as “dream investors.” Taking a leaf from the Jeff Bezos school of fundraising, he said, “I decided to assemble the right investors for my mission.” That mission: to double down on growth, with an appetite for a little risk thrown in by way of its AI play.
Paul Madera, co-founder and partner at Meritech, and Marc Magliacano, a managing partner at L Catterton, are both joining the board with this round.
Tech
AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users, per Have I Been Pwned
A cyberattack at AI music generator Suno last year allowed a hacker to steal the personal information of more than 55.3 million people, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, offering the first glimpse into the scale of the data theft.
Per Have I Been Pwned, which obtained a copy of the breached dataset, the stolen data included customers’ names, physical addresses and email addresses, phone numbers, purchases, and partial payment card numbers taken from the company’s Stripe account, including card expiry dates.
The breach happened in November 2025, but was only recently revealed thanks to reporting by independent news outlet 404 Media.
The data theft also included Suno’s source code, which revealed how the company allegedly scraped millions of songs and lyrics from popular streaming sites, including Deezer, Genius, and YouTube, to train its AI models. Several major record labels are currently suing Suno, claiming that its mass-scraping efforts violate copyright law.
Suno has not yet publicly disclosed the cyberattack, or notified individuals that their information was taken. Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment about the incident.
Tech
After TikTok, Snap settles social media addiction case
Snap is the latest big tech company to settle a lawsuit that claimed social media platforms are harmful to children and young adults. The company has reached a “tentative” agreement in a case that was set to go to trial later this month.
TikTok recently settled its portion of the case with the plaintiff, known by the initials “R.K.C.,” ahead of a jury trial that starts next week in Los Angeles.
YouTube has also reached a deal, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant.
Meta has lost similar child safety lawsuits focused on social media, including one in New Mexico earlier this year, which marked its first courtroom defeat over the matter. In March, a Los Angeles jury also handed the social media giant, along with Google, another defeat, and awarded the defendant in that case, who went by “K.G.M,” or Kaley, $6 million in damages.
The precedents set by these cases are encouraging a wave of lawsuits against social media platforms over their purported harms, including their addictive nature and algorithms that negatively impact children and teens’ mental health. The results of these lawsuits could see the companies reshaping their platforms with more robust child safety measures, parental controls, and other design choices that could help them avoid future litigation.
The terms of Snap’s agreement weren’t disclosed, but Bloomberg reports that Snap confirmed the settlement has been achieved.
Snap did not immediately return a request for comment.
Tech
Light made a flip phone. It’s colorful and it’s cheap.
Kaiwei Tang helped create the iconic Motorola Razr over 20 years ago. Now, 10 years into building Light, the startup behind the minimalist smartphone alternative Light Phone, he’s as surprised as anyone that his customers are begging for a flip phone.
“We’ve been interviewing young people that use flip phones for a few years,” Tang told TechCrunch, describing a pattern his team kept running into: Gen Z users love their flip phones but say the build quality is bad. “They’re describing the flip phones in negative language, but they stick with it, and they feel proud.”
So Tang and co-founder Joe Hollier had an idea. What if Light took the fast, custom software from its last three touch screen phones and put it into a flip phone? That’s how they decided to build the Light Flip, the most affordable device that Light has ever released.
“What we’re doing is offering the same Light Phone experience, the same Light Phone OS with our SDK developer program, all of the tools we already have today: alarm, calculator, calendar…” Hollier told TechCrunch. “It’s kind of the exact same experience, just one is fully tactile, no touch screen, and [the other] one is a complete touch screen experience.”
Pricing has always been Light’s hardest problem as a small hardware startup. How do you sell a “less” phone for a price people will actually pay, when the whole pitch is fewer features? Its previous release, the unlocked Light Phone III, retails at $799. But the Light Flip brings the cost down to $299 by dropping a touch screen, NFC reader, and selfie camera. The Light Flip is also made of plastic, rather than sturdier aluminum, but that means that for the first time, Light can offer one of its phones in a range of colors: black, red, yellow, pink, navy blue, and light grey.
“I thought I was fully QWERTY, but I was having fun with the T9 predictive texting [the old-school method of typing multiple letters per number], so I can see myself going flip phone also for the colors,” Hollier said. “Just having a yellow phone gets me so jazzed.”
Beyond the sticker price, Light is also testing a financing play. It recently piloted phone contracts with Andrew Yang’s anti-doomscrolling carrier Noble Mobile. With Light’s own service plan, customers can get the Light Flip for a two-year contract at $39 per month; the Light Phone III will be available for $59 per month over the same time frame.
The Light Flip only has a 2.8″ OLED screen on the inside and no screen on the outside, as requested by users. There will be a small light on the front of the phone, however, so that you can see if you have notifications without flipping open the device. With 5G and 4GLTE connectivity, the Light Flip can download podcasts online and play music that you upload to your phone, which you can listen to via either a 3.5mm headphone jack or Bluetooth headphones. It charges via USB-C, works with both eSIM and physical Nano SIM cards, and includes a 12-megapixel camera on the back.
The Light Flip is expected to ship in April 2027, which Light acknowledges is a long lead time. To keep preorder customers engaged (and, practically, to keep them from canceling before it ships), the company is launching a new “Flip Your Life” program, including bi-weekly newsletters to help people prepare for the lifestyle adjustment of ditching a smartphone. It’s a community-building move as much as a marketing one. By building a support network around the phone, Light hopes that the transition to using its products will be less jarring and that it sticks.
While Light believes that its phones can help people reclaim the time they may regret spending on mindless scrolling, the founders acknowledge that it’s not easy to quit smartphones cold turkey. It’s hard to sacrifice the convenience of instant internet access, Apple Pay, music streaming, and convenient communication tools like WhatsApp and iMessage, and it’s easier for the flip phone-curious to make this transition when they’re not going through it alone.
“I think something that’s so inspiring about this movement is it’s not coming from a place of just anger and hatred… It’s a movement of optimism, as well as skepticism,” Hollier said. “I think that’s what we’ve always tried to do with Light. We’re anti big tech in all these ways, but we’re always trying to show that the other side of life can be really simple and beautiful.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users, per Have I Been Pwned
The Latest Poster For Avengers: Doomsday Secretly Spoils The Plot
