Gympass's B2B gym-pass bet: employers buy one pass, $2.2B valuation by 2021

B2B2C corporate wellness platform: companies pay per employee for a pass to gyms, studios, virtual trainers and wellness apps across 13+ countries

That employers, not individuals, should pay for fitness: one flexible corporate pass covering 50,000+ gyms, studios and wellness apps, so employees actually show up

Bootstrapped in São Paulo from 2012; by June 2021 raised a $220M Series E with SoftBank, General Atlantic, Moore Strategic, Kaszek and Valor (TechCrunch)

Cesar Carvalho, a Brazil-based McKinsey consultant who could never find a gym that fit his travel schedule, built a consumer gym pass in São Paulo in 2012, then dropped out of Harvard Business School to run it (TechCrunch).

Clients pulled it international: a Brazilian customer asked for Mexico, a Spanish bank for Spain. By May 2021 Gympass logged 4M monthly check-ins across 50,000+ partners, and in June raised $220M at a $2.2B valuation (TechCrunch). The pass bundled wellness apps like Calm alongside gyms, and a 2024 rebrand to Wellhub widened the scope beyond fitness to therapy, nutrition and sleep (Athletech News).

Still independent and growing. Rebranded to Wellhub in April 2024; 3M subscribers and 500M annual check-ins by August 2024, and by July 2025 a $2.4B company serving 26,000 businesses (Athletech News, Fortune).

The B2C-to-B2B pivot inverted the unit economics: one employer contract with thousands of seats cost less to sell than thousands of individual subscriptions.

Expansion was demand-pulled: clients asked for new countries as they expanded, so growth cost almost nothing in marketing.

Percentage-of-usage economics aligned incentives: gyms and instructors are paid per check-in, so supply scales only when demand is real.

The pandemic stress-tested the model: digital wellness partners kept corporate renewals alive when gyms were dark.

When a consumer product gets adopted inside an organization, the organization, not the end user, may be the real buyer — pivot the sales model to whoever pays, even if usage stays individual.

As of July 2025 Wellhub is still private and New York-headquartered after moving its headquarters from São Paulo in 2018. It reports a $2.4B valuation, 26,000 corporate clients including Unilever and Aflac, and a network of 50,000+ in-person gyms and studios, 3,800 virtual trainers and 93 wellness apps across the US, Europe and Latin America. Founder Cesar Carvalho remains CEO; the company has repeatedly weighed an IPO, most recently signaled with the 2024 rebrand (Athletech News, Fortune).