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Startup Deep Dive : Fittr — turned its first profit in FY25 after three years of losses

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Fittr.

Fittr turned its first profit in FY25: an ₹11 crore surplus on ₹128 crore in revenue, as per the company’s FY25 filings reported by Whalesbook (August 2026) and Moneymint (June 2025) — three years after it booked a ₹41.5 crore loss on ₹87.5 crore of revenue in FY23, according to Registrar of Companies filings reported by Entrackr (January 2025). The same year Fittr crossed into the black, India’s best-funded fitness platform, cult.fit, posted a ₹480.8 crore loss on ₹1,215.5 crore of revenue — a business roughly nine times Fittr’s size, still deep in the red (Entrackr, December 2025).

That contrast is the whole story. Fittr never took the capital-heavy, gym-and-app route. It started in January 2016 with ₹90,000 (about $1,200 then) and a WhatsApp group of overweight friends, raised a comparatively modest $17 million (₹163 crore) across its entire life as per CB Insights and corroborated by Founder Thesis (August 2024), and got to five million community members before it ever bought a paid ad in earnest. It also spent three straight years losing money before figuring out, in FY24, how to stop.

Quick facts

Company Squats Fitness Private Limited, operating as Fittr (formerly SQUATS)
Founded WhatsApp group in 2014; formally incorporated January 2016
Founder(s) Jitendra Chouksey (CEO), with Jyoti Dabas, Rohit Chattopadhyay, Bala Krishna Reddy and Sonal Singh
Businesses Fitness & nutrition coaching marketplace, freemium app, INFS coach certification, Fittr HART smart ring
Latest FY revenue ₹128 crore in FY25 (Entrackr-family reporting, 2026) — Inc42’s tracker separately lists ₹101.1 crore for FY25; see The numbers
Latest FY profit/loss Profit before tax of ₹11 crore in FY25 (per Whalesbook/Moneymint); Inc42’s tracker lists a smaller ₹38.8 lakh net profit for the same year
Listed Private; no IPO announced as of September 2026
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed; total equity raised to date is approximately $17 million (CB Insights; Founder Thesis, August 2024)
Key shareholders / CEO Jitendra Chouksey (founder, reported to retain majority equity as of the January 2024 round); investors include Sequoia’s Surge, Dream Capital, Elysian Park Ventures, Rainmatter Capital and, since June 2026, cricketer Rohit Sharma

What they do

Fittr runs an online fitness and nutrition coaching marketplace built on top of a free community. Anyone can download the app, use its diet and training tools, browse a recipe database and post questions to a community that Fittr says has crossed five million members across roughly a hundred countries (Founder Thesis, August 2024). The company’s actual customers, though, are the smaller slice of that base who pay for one-on-one coaching: certified trainers and nutritionists who build a personalised plan, run weekly check-ins and charge packages starting near ₹6,500 for three months (StartupTalky, November 2021). Alongside coaching, Fittr sells INFS fitness-and-nutrition certification courses to people who want to become coaches themselves, and, more recently, a wearable called the Fittr HART smart ring.

The origin

Jitendra Chouksey was not building a startup when this began. He was an SAP consultant who had spent more than eight years moving between Mphasis, L&T and IBM, and fitness was a personal project born out of being bullied for his weight as a young man (Founder Thesis, August 2024). In 2014 he started training friends and family for free over a WhatsApp group. Demand outgrew the format quickly: he was coaching close to 180–190 people at no charge, so he wrote up his method as a guide called “Get Shredded” and moved the group to Facebook, where it became SQUATS — Systematic Quantitative Unified Aesthetic Transformation System.

The insight that turned a favour into a company was simple: people did not need another workout app, they needed a coach and a community that would not let them quit. SQUATS crossed 50,000 members by the end of 2015 purely on word of mouth, with zero paid marketing (StartupTalky, November 2021). Chouksey formally launched the business in January 2016 with ₹90,000 in capital, and stayed at his day job — by then earning about ₹24–25 lakh a month in his SAP practice — until April 2016, when he quit to run Fittr full time (Founder Thesis, August 2024).

The struggle years

The first setback was structural, not financial. Early in the company’s life, a group of co-founders and top coaches split away, taking website development work and three of the platform’s leading trainers with them — a period Chouksey has described as one where operations were “severely compromised” (Founder Thesis, August 2024). The team rebuilt the coaching bench and kept growing anyway: community size went from roughly 850,000 members in April 2020 (YourStory, April 2020) to three million by January 2024 (Entrackr, January 2024).

The second setback showed up in the numbers, several years later. Chasing that growth cost money. Fittr’s own founder has said the company lost close to ₹40 crore in a single year during its FY22–FY23 expansion phase (Founder Thesis, August 2024) — a figure that lines up with the audited loss of ₹41.5 crore on ₹87.5 crore of revenue that Registrar of Companies filings show for FY23 (Entrackr, January 2025). Total expenses that year ran to ₹131 crore against ₹87.5 crore of revenue — the company was spending roughly ₹1.50 for every rupee it earned.

The turning point

The turning point was not a single funding event or a viral moment. It was a hard reset of the cost base between FY23 and FY24. Total expenses fell 26% year-on-year, from ₹131 crore to ₹97 crore, even as revenue held nearly flat at ₹85 crore (Entrackr, January 2025). Employee benefit costs were cut 36.2% to ₹20.8 crore, advertising spend was cut 65.8% to ₹8.4 crore, and other overheads came down 30% to ₹13.5 crore. The loss shrank 73.5%, from ₹41.5 crore to ₹11 crore, in one year.

That reset carried into FY25. Revenue jumped to ₹128 crore and the company posted its first-ever profit before tax of ₹11 crore, after three consecutive years of losses (Whalesbook, August 2026; Moneymint, June 2025). Subscription-based coaching is reported to have driven ₹122 crore of that ₹128 crore top line. On the other side of the ledger sits Inc42’s company tracker, which lists a lower FY25 revenue figure of ₹101.1 crore (17% growth over its own FY24 base of ₹86.3 crore) and a much smaller net profit of ₹38.8 lakh. The two trackers disagree on scale but agree on direction: Fittr grew and turned profitable in FY25, after burning cash for years.

The money behind it

Fittr stayed bootstrapped far longer than most venture-backed apps its size, and its funding shape reflects that:

Total equity raised across these rounds is reported at approximately $17 million, or about ₹163 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 (CB Insights; Founder Thesis, August 2024). No valuation figure has been made public for any round, including the most recent one.

How it makes money

Fittr runs a freemium marketplace: the app, community and basic tools are free, and the company earns from a paid layer on top.

The part people tend to get wrong is assuming Fittr sells software. It largely sells human coaching time at scale, using the free community and app as the funnel and retention layer; the company itself is a marketplace between paying members and its roster of several hundred certified coaches, most of whom trained through Fittr’s own INFS courses (Founder Thesis, August 2024). Cost discipline on that coaching bench — not a new product — is what took the company from a ₹41.5 crore loss to an ₹11 crore profit in two years.

The numbers

Metric (₹ crore) FY23 FY24 FY25
Revenue 87.5 85.0 (86.3 incl. other income) 128.0 (Entrackr-family); 101.1 per Inc42’s tracker
Total expenses 131.0 97.0 95.2 per Inc42’s tracker; not independently confirmed elsewhere
Profit / (loss) (41.5) (11.0) +11.0 (Entrackr-family); +0.388 (₹38.8 lakh) per Inc42’s tracker
EBITDA margin / ROCE not disclosed -10.66% / -38.89% not disclosed by Entrackr-family sources

Sources: Entrackr (January 2025) for FY23 and FY24 figures, drawn from Registrar of Companies filings; Whalesbood and Moneymint (2026/2025) for the higher FY25 figures; Inc42’s company financials tracker for the lower, divergent FY25 figures. The two FY25 readings cannot both be exactly right, and neither publisher has published the underlying filing alongside its number, so both are shown rather than one being silently picked.

Where the money comes from

The surprise is less about geography than about mix: a wellness brand that built its name on a free Facebook community earns almost all of its money — on the FY25 numbers, roughly 95% — from one line, personal coaching subscriptions, rather than from advertising, hardware or certification, both of which remain small by comparison.

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in Fittr’s numbers is not that community-led growth beats paid acquisition, though it helped keep the company alive on ₹90,000 of starting capital. It is that a company can grow revenue for years and still be one bad cost year away from a crisis, and that the fix, when it came, was not a new product or a bigger raise — it was cutting employee costs by more than a third and advertising by two-thirds in a single year. Fittr’s founders did not out-innovate cult.fit’s balance sheet; they simply stopped spending money they had not earned, on a business a fraction of its rival’s size, and let the smaller number turn positive first.

Frequently asked questions

What does Fittr actually sell?

Fittr sells personalised fitness and nutrition coaching through certified trainers, on top of a free app and community; it also sells INFS coach-certification courses and, more recently, the Fittr HART smart ring (StartupTalky, November 2021; Entrackr, January 2025).

Who founded Fittr and when?

Jitendra Chouksey started it as a free WhatsApp fitness group in 2014, with Jyoti Dabas, Rohit Chattopadhyay, Bala Krishna Reddy and Sonal Singh joining as co-founders; the business was formally launched in January 2016 with ₹90,000 in capital (Founder Thesis, August 2024; StartupTalky, November 2021).

Is Fittr profitable?

As per FY25 figures reported by Whalesbook (August 2026) and Moneymint (June 2025), Fittr posted its first profit — ₹11 crore before tax on ₹128 crore of revenue — after three straight years of losses. Inc42’s company tracker separately lists a smaller FY25 profit of ₹38.8 lakh on ₹101.1 crore of revenue, so the exact scale of the turnaround is not settled across sources.

How much funding has Fittr raised?

About $17 million in total, across an undisclosed 2019 investment from Suniel Shetty, a $2 million Pre-Series A from Sequoia’s Surge in 2020, an $11.5 million Series A led by Dream Capital and Elysian Park Ventures in 2021, and ₹28 crore (about $3.5 million) from Zerodha’s Rainmatter Capital in January 2024, with cricketer Rohit Sharma joining as an investor and equity partner in June 2026 for an undisclosed amount (CB Insights; Entrackr, January 2024; BestMediaInfo, June 2026).

Who are Fittr’s main competitors?

Cult.fit and HealthifyMe are the two most frequently cited rivals. Cult.fit is far larger by revenue — ₹1,215.5 crore in FY25 against Fittr’s reported ₹128 crore — and held an estimated 35% of the organised premium and mid-premium Indian fitness market in early 2026, but it also posted a much larger loss of ₹480.8 crore the same year (Entrackr, December 2025).

Sources

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

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