Business

India’s Fitness Tech Industry Is Growing Up and Diverse Retails Private Limited Is Leading the Way

0

A decade ago, organized fitness in India meant a local gym, a morning walk, or a yoga class at the neighbourhood studio. Today, it means app-based workout subscriptions, AI-powered nutrition coaching, corporate wellness programs, and omnichannel platforms that combine physical centres with digital delivery. The sector has transformed faster than almost any other consumer category in the country — and the company that sits at the centre of that transformation is Diverse Retails Private Limited, better known by its consumer brand: Cult.fit.

Understanding Cult.fit’s journey is essentially a case study in how India’s fitness industry evolved from fragmented, unorganized, and largely offline to structured, technology-driven, and increasingly investor-ready.

What Is Diverse Retails Private Limited?

Diverse Retails Private Limited is the registered legal entity behind Cult.fit — formerly known as Cure.fit — one of India’s most recognized fitness and wellness brands. The company was incorporated on December 15, 2016, in Bangalore, Karnataka, and is registered with the Registrar of Companies in Bangalore under CIN U74999KA2016PTC098488.

Founded by Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori, both veterans of India’s startup ecosystem — Bansal previously co-founded Myntra and Nagori was an early executive at Flipkart — the company set out to build something that didn’t yet exist in India: a comprehensive, tech-enabled health and fitness platform that addressed physical fitness, nutrition, and mental wellness under one roof.

The corporate name has remained Diverse Retails Private Limited throughout, even as the consumer-facing brand evolved from Cure.fit to Cult.fit. Its associated brand Cultsport, which operates as an online platform for fitness equipment and accessories, is also linked to the same registered entity, based at BHIVE Workspace, AKR Techpark, Hosur Road, Bangalore.

From Zero to ₹1,216 Crore: The Growth Story

The company’s financial trajectory reflects the ambition behind its founding. In FY18, revenue grew at a staggering pace from near zero to ₹24 crore as the company rapidly opened physical centres across Bangalore, Delhi NCR, and Hyderabad. By FY25, Cult.fit posted revenue of ₹1,216 crore — a 31 percent increase over the previous year — while narrowing its EBITDA losses, signalling progress toward a financially sustainable model.

As of August 2025, the company employs 88 professionals at its Bangalore headquarters, with a broader operational workforce across its physical network of fitness centres. It generated revenue of ₹289 crore through its Cultsport segment for the financial year ending March 31, 2025.

The company has attracted significant institutional backing. In January 2026, Cult.fit raised ₹4.2 billion from Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s state-owned investment company — a vote of confidence that came alongside the company’s announcement of plans for an IPO. By January 2026, Cult.fit had engaged investment bankers to manage an upcoming ₹2,500 crore public offering, making it one of the most anticipated listings in India’s consumer health and fitness sector.

What Cult.fit Actually Offers

The platform’s breadth is part of what makes it a compelling case study for the fitness tech industry. Cult.fit’s offerings span:

Cult Pass — a membership product giving users access to unlimited gym sessions and group workout classes across the network of physical Cult.fit centres.

Cult Transform — a structured weight loss and body transformation coaching program combining workouts, nutrition guidance, and tracking.

Sugar.fit — a specialized program for diabetes management that combines lifestyle coaching with medical monitoring.

Eat.fit — a healthy food and nutrition delivery service that complements the fitness programming.

Mind.fit — a mental wellness platform covering meditation, yoga, and stress management.

Cultsport — an e-commerce platform selling fitness equipment and accessories including spin bikes, treadmills, rowers, yoga mats, and fitness supplements.

Corporate wellness — B2B programs delivered to employers seeking structured health and wellness benefits for their workforce.

This diversified model is significant. It reflects a bet that Indian consumers will increasingly approach health holistically — seeking integrated solutions rather than standalone gym memberships or siloed app subscriptions.

The Industry Context: India’s Fitness Tech Boom

Diverse Retails Private Limited didn’t build its business in a vacuum. It grew alongside and helped shape a fitness technology sector in India that has attracted substantial capital and attention.

India’s fitness tech sector raised $989 million despite cautious broader funding activity in the period through 2025, supporting over 600 startups across fitness, wellness, and health technology. Bengaluru alone accounted for $898 million of that investment — reflecting the city’s role as the epicentre of India’s health tech startup ecosystem. Cult.fit, HealthifyMe, Ultrahuman, and FITTR are among the prominent names in this landscape.

The drivers behind this growth are structural. India has one of the world’s youngest populations, a rapidly expanding urban middle class with rising disposable income, a post-pandemic shift in health consciousness, and smartphone penetration that makes app-based service delivery viable at scale in a way it wasn’t a decade ago. Chronic disease prevalence — including diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular conditions — is also creating demand for preventive health and lifestyle management services that go beyond traditional gym memberships.

The Business Model Challenges

Building a profitable fitness tech business in India is harder than the growth numbers alone suggest. Cult.fit has operated at a loss throughout most of its existence — ₹481 crore in losses in FY25, though narrowing relative to revenue. The economics of running physical fitness centres are capital-intensive: real estate, equipment, instructor costs, and member acquisition expenses all weigh on margins.

The company’s strategy has been to use physical centres as brand-building and community infrastructure while driving higher-margin digital revenue through subscriptions, coaching programs, and e-commerce. The Cultsport equipment business contributes a revenue stream with different margin characteristics than the services business.

Whether this model reaches profitability before or after its planned IPO will be one of the defining questions the public markets will price. The narrowing EBITDA losses in FY25 are an encouraging signal, but the path from loss-making growth company to profitable public entity is rarely linear.


What Diverse Retails Private Limited Represents for the Sector

As a company, Diverse Retails Private Limited — Cult.fit — represents something specific about how India’s consumer health market is evolving. It’s not a pure-play tech company with no physical footprint. It’s not a traditional gym chain with no digital layer. It’s a hybrid model that treats physical and digital as complementary rather than competing channels.

That hybrid approach is increasingly the template other players in the Indian fitness market are trying to replicate — and it’s the model that has attracted institutional investors like Temasek who see the integrated health and wellness platform opportunity in India as a long-term structural play rather than a short-term trend.

The Invest India platform, the national investment promotion and facilitation agency, tracks the wellness and fitness sector as one of the high-priority growth areas for foreign and domestic investment — providing data on market size, regulatory environment, and investment opportunity across health, wellness, and fitness in the Indian context.


The Road Ahead

With an IPO in preparation, a Temasek-backed balance sheet, and revenue growing at 31 percent year-on-year, Diverse Retails Private Limited enters its next chapter as one of the most closely watched companies in Indian consumer health. Whether the Cult.fit brand can sustain its growth trajectory, achieve meaningful profitability, and successfully navigate the scrutiny that comes with being a public company will be among the more interesting business stories to follow in India over the next two to three years.

The company that started as a Bangalore fitness centre experiment in 2016 has become a bellwether for the broader question of whether tech-enabled wellness can build durable, profitable businesses in one of the world’s most promising consumer markets.


Meta Description: Diverse Retails Private Limited — the company behind Cult.fit — is a leading example of India’s booming fitness tech industry. Here’s its story and what the sector looks like today.

(160 characters)


Tags: Diverse Retails Private Limited, Cult.fit, India Fitness Tech, Health and Wellness Industry

Mayra Smithey

Professional Email Greetings: How to Open Every Email the Right Way

Previous article

Rivian Autonomous Driving: How an EV Startup Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Self-Driving Tech

Next article

You may also like

Comments

Comments are closed.

More in Business