Startup Deep Dive : cult.fit — cuts its loss 71% and turns EBITDA-positive ahead of its IPO

cult.fit is trying to go public on the back of a business that has lost money for most of its ten years — and for once, the losses are actually shrinking fast enough to matter. In the year ending March 2026, the fitness company narrowed its net loss to ₹251.85 crore ($26 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) on revenue of ₹1,801.81 crore, and for the first time posted a positive adjusted EBITDA of ₹144.8 crore, according to the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) it filed with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in July 2026.

That single filing settles an argument that has followed the company since 2016: is cult.fit a fitness brand, or is it a sportswear retailer wearing a gym’s clothes? The DRHP shows nearly a third of FY26 revenue came not from gym memberships but from Cultsport, its apparel and equipment arm — and more than two-thirds of its 708 fitness centres aren’t even run by the company itself. This is the story of how a wellness “super app” that once tried to be four companies at once — fitness, food, diagnostics and mental health — cut itself down to two businesses, survived a pandemic, and arrived at an IPO still losing money but no longer bleeding it.

Quick facts

What they do

Cult.fit sells access to fitness — through Cultpass memberships that unlock gym floors, group classes and personal training at its own centres, at franchised Cult centres, and at the Gold’s Gym outlets it took over as master franchisee — and it sells the equipment and apparel people use once they’re inside, through its Cultsport retail arm. Its customers are urban, largely metro India: office workers who want a gym within a few kilometres of home or work, and increasingly, corporate wellness buyers signing up entire workforces. What began as an attempt to bundle fitness, healthy food, diagnostics and mental health into one health “super app” has, a decade on, narrowed to essentially two businesses: gym memberships and gym gear.

The origin

Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori started Curefit in May 2016 in Bengaluru, months after both left Flipkart — Bansal had sold Myntra to Flipkart in 2014 and gone on to run its fashion and lifestyle business, while Nagori had been Flipkart’s chief business officer. Their founding insight was that urban India’s growing health consciousness had no organised, app-first way to act on it: people were juggling unbranded gyms, freelance nutritionists, scattered yoga studios and one-off doctor visits, with nothing tying the pieces together on price, quality or convenience. Curefit raised roughly $15 million in seed funding from Accel, IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital and used part of it to acquire a small Bengaluru gym chain called Cult — the acquisition that would eventually give the whole company its public-facing name. The original plan was broader than fitness alone: Curefit set out to build fitness (Cult), healthy food delivery (Eat.fit), primary healthcare and diagnostics (Care.fit) and meditation (Mind.fit) as four connected verticals under one app and one membership.

The struggle years

The four-vertical vision did not survive contact with reality. In May 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns shut every offline Cult centre overnight, the company laid off and furloughed several hundred employees — reports at the time put the number at roughly 800 to 1,000 people, including trainers and other centre staff, alongside company-wide pay cuts. It was a brutal reversal for a business that had raised well over $300 million in the two years before the pandemic to build out capacity across all four verticals simultaneously.

The company’s answer was to cut its ambitions rather than its cash burn indefinitely. Care.fit’s consultations and diagnostics business was wound down, and Eat.fit was spun off as a separate entity in 2021, taking the “cure” out of Curefit’s four-way bet. In May 2021 the company formally renamed itself from cure.fit to cult.fit, an admission, in branding terms, that its fitness vertical was the one actually working. Even that narrower business kept stumbling on the finances: despite revenue crossing ₹900 crore for the first time, cult.fit’s net loss zoomed 42% to ₹888.5 crore in FY24 (year to March 2024) from the year before, as per its financial filings reported by Outlook Business and Inc42 — its widest loss since the pandemic — and the company responded in 2024 with a fresh, smaller round of layoffs affecting around 150 employees, concentrated at the mid-to-senior level.

The turning point

The FY24 results were the moment cult.fit’s old story — grow revenue and let losses widen along with it — stopped being credible to its own board and backers. Before: FY24 revenue of ₹926.6 crore came with a net loss of ₹888.5 crore, a loss nearly as large as revenue itself, and no EBITDA profitability in sight. That combination triggered the 2024 layoffs, a harder push to convert company-run centres into capital-light franchised and marketplace outlets, and a bigger bet on the higher-margin Cultsport retail business. After: by FY26, revenue had roughly doubled to ₹1,801.81 crore, the net loss had shrunk by more than 70% to ₹251.85 crore, and the company posted its first positive adjusted EBITDA of ₹144.8 crore, per its DRHP. That two-year swing — not any single funding round — is what made a July 2026 IPO filing plausible rather than premature.

The money behind it

Cult.fit has raised a reported $720 million to over $809 million across 18 rounds since 2016, according to Entrackr and Inc42 respectively — the gap between the two figures reflects differences in how each tracker treats later tranches and pre-IPO placements, but both agree the company is among the most heavily capitalised fitness businesses in India. Accel, IDG Ventures India and Kalaari Capital backed the original 2016 seed round and the Cult gym acquisition that followed. Zomato bought a 6.4% stake for $100 million in November 2021, a round that pushed the company to unicorn status for the first time. Tata Digital invested as part of the Series F round completed the following year, a cheque that arrived just as the company was still recovering from its pandemic-era layoffs and vertical shutdowns. Temasek, investing through its arm MacRitchie, has built its stake over several rounds and led the most recent one — a ₹440 crore (about $47 million) Series G round in March 2026 that took its holding to 11.88% and valued cult.fit at roughly ₹13,668 crore (about $1.45 billion), per Entrackr; a separate DRHP-based estimate cited by Outlook Business puts the figure closer to ₹12,600 crore (about $1.5 billion). Either way, that March 2026 round was reported as the company’s last private raise before its IPO.

How it makes money

Cult.fit’s revenue splits into two very different kinds of business. Fitness services — Cultpass memberships across owned, franchised and marketplace centres, personal training and corporate wellness contracts — made up 69.62% of FY26 revenue. Cultsport, the apparel, footwear and home-fitness equipment arm, made up the remaining 30.38%, selling both through the cult.fit app and its own retail outlets. On the cost side, the FY25 numbers show where the money goes: employee costs of ₹347.4 crore, facility management of ₹129.3 crore, marketing of ₹203 crore and service fees — largely tied to the franchise network — of ₹260 crore, which grew 37% year-on-year as the company leaned harder into franchising. Franchise partners, who run 69.21% of the 708 total centres, are reported by startup-advisory sites StartupTalky and BusinessesCompanies to pay cult.fit anywhere from roughly 10% to as much as 30% of monthly revenue as a royalty depending on the specific agreement — cult.fit itself has not disclosed a single official rate in its public filings, so treat that range as indicative rather than exact. The part most outsiders get wrong is assuming cult.fit is a chain of company-owned gyms: most of the centres carrying its signage are actually run by third parties, and a third of its revenue is really a sportswear and equipment retail business riding on the same brand and app.

The numbers

Revenue has grown every year since FY23, when it stood at ₹694 crore, while losses have moved in the opposite direction since their FY24 peak. Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss, in ₹ crore, as reported in cult.fit’s financial disclosures and DRHP.

Total expenses rose from ₹1,563 crore in FY24 to ₹1,751 crore in FY25, growing far more slowly than revenue — the arithmetic behind the loss narrowing even before FY26’s adjusted-EBITDA milestone.

Where the money comes from

The segment split — 69.62% fitness services, 30.38% Cultsport products in FY26 — is one surprise; the geography split is the bigger one. Four metro markets, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, accounted for 90.44% of cult.fit’s fitness services revenue in FY26, up from 85.5% in FY24, according to its DRHP as reported by Outlook Business. That means concentration is getting worse, not better, even as the company talks publicly about expanding from around 77 cities toward 100 over the next several years. For a company positioning itself as a national fitness brand ahead of an IPO, the honest picture is a business still overwhelmingly dependent on four Indian cities, with everywhere else contributing under a tenth of its core fitness revenue.

The risks

Three risks stand out from cult.fit’s own DRHP disclosures, not just outside speculation. First, franchise dependency: with 69.21% of its 708 centres run by franchisees or marketplace partners, the company has, in its own words, “limited operational and financial control” over how those centres are actually run — a hygiene lapse or bad trainer at one franchised centre becomes a national brand problem cult.fit cannot directly fix. Second, supply-chain concentration: 38.59% of Cultsport’s procurement costs in FY26 came from China, meaning the fastest-growing, higher-margin part of the business is also the part most exposed to tariff changes or shipping disruption. Third, internal controls: the company’s own auditors flagged that backup systems for sales records at premium centres were not being maintained daily, and that audit trails in point-of-sale software could not be verified as continuously enabled through the year — gaps the company says it expects to close by FY27, but the kind of disclosure that invites closer scrutiny once a company is publicly listed. The DRHP also flags ₹55 crore in pending litigation against subsidiaries and roughly ₹488 crore in cases naming its directors.

The takeaway

Cult.fit’s most useful lesson isn’t about fitness at all — it’s about how founders decide what to stop doing. The company spent its first four years trying to be a single app for fitness, food, diagnostics and mental health, and it took a pandemic to force the admission that only one of those four businesses was actually working. The version of cult.fit now filing for an IPO is smaller in ambition than the one Bansal and Nagori pitched in 2016 — no more Care.fit, no more in-house Eat.fit — and it is precisely that narrowing that got it to positive adjusted EBITDA. Sometimes the turnaround isn’t a new idea; it’s admitting which of the old ideas to drop.

Frequently asked questions

What does cult.fit actually sell?

Two things: Cultpass memberships that give access to fitness centres — its own, franchised, and Gold’s Gym outlets it operates as master franchisee — and Cultsport, a retail line of fitness apparel, footwear and equipment sold through its app and stores.

Is cult.fit the same company as Curefit?

Yes, historically. The company was founded as Curefit Healthcare Private Limited in 2016, renamed cure.fit to cult.fit in May 2021 to reflect its fitness-first focus, and converted to Cult.fit Limited in April 2026 ahead of its IPO, per Finshots’ reading of the DRHP. It is unrelated to Curefoods, a separate cloud-kitchen company; the two share only a distant history through Eat.fit, which Curefit spun off as an independent business in 2021.

Who founded cult.fit and when?

Mukesh Bansal, co-founder of Myntra, and Ankit Nagori, former chief business officer at Flipkart, founded it as Curefit in Bengaluru in May 2016.

Is cult.fit profitable?

Not on a net basis. It reported a net loss of ₹251.85 crore for FY26 (year to March 2026), though it posted a positive adjusted EBITDA of ₹144.8 crore for the same year — its first — as disclosed in its DRHP.

How much is cult.fit worth, and is it publicly listed?

It was valued at roughly ₹12,600–13,668 crore (about $1.45–1.5 billion) after a March 2026 funding round, per Entrackr and Outlook Business. It is not yet listed; it filed its draft IPO prospectus with SEBI in July 2026 and an IPO date, price band, and exchange listing are yet to be announced.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Cult.fit files DRHP with SEBI, plans Rs 950 Cr fresh issue and 17.86 Cr share OFS,” July 2026
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Temasek increases stake in Cult.fit to 12% after Rs 440 Cr investment,” March 2026
• Entrackr, “Cult.fit’s income crosses Rs 1,000 Cr in FY24, losses remain flat,” 2024
• Outlook Money, “Cult.fit IPO: DRHP Filed for Rs 950 Crore Fresh Issue & OFS. Check Financials & Key Risks Before Investing,” July 2026
• Outlook Business, “Cult.fit IPO Explained: What The DRHP Reveals About The Company’s Risks,” July 2026
• Finshots, “The Cult.fit IPO Explained,” 2026
• Inc42, “cult.fit Funding 2026 – Total Funding, Rounds & Investors,” March 2026
• Inc42, “CureFit FY25: Net Loss Narrows 83% YoY to ₹483 Cr,” August 2026
• Inc42, “CureFit’s FY24 Loss Zooms 42% To INR 889 Cr,” 2024
• HRKatha, “Cure.fit lays off 800, closes some centres to cut costs,” May 2020
• OfficeChai, “Cult.Fit Lays Off 150 Employees As Part Of A Cost Cutting Exercise,” 2024
• Business Standard, “Cult.fit acquires Gold’s Gym fitness chain in India,” February 2022
• India Entrepreneur / BW Healthcare World, “cure.fit renames to cult.fit after its flagship fitness vertical,” May 2021
• StartupTalky, “Cult.fit Success Story — How Does This India’s Leading Health and Fitness Company Make Money?,” 2026
• Angel One, “Zomato Backed Fitness Firm Cult.Fit Selects Bankers for ₹2,500 Crore IPO,” 2026

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