SEA is growing up fast, but enterprise fitness tech still has homework to do

As FitnessForce folds into US-based Daxko, the more interesting story is not the deal itself but what happens after it. Can a company built around the messy realities of India and the Gulf keep its product edge inside a larger US software group?

In this edited Q&A with e27, Hadi Curtay, former CEO of FitnessForce and now Managing Director at Daxko, argues that the company’s value was never about hype. It was built around localisation, operational detail, and software for fitness operators running across multiple sites and markets. He says India and the GCC remain the company’s strongest territories, while Southeast Asia is promising but uneven.

Also Read: The rise of ‘Strava Jockeys’: How Indonesia’s vanity economy is hacking the fitness tech ecosystem

Curtay also addresses a familiar founder anxiety after acquisitions: the team stays, the knowledge gets transferred, and the product slowly fades into somebody else’s roadmap.

The fundraising journey in emerging markets can be rough. Did regional VCs really understand the problem you were solving?

Not really, and that shaped how we built FitnessForce. Most investors understood the broad market story. It was not hard to see that fitness in India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia was growing on the back of rising incomes, urbanisation, and greater health awareness. The harder part was explaining the kind of company we were building.

We were not another consumer app chasing millions of users. We were building operational software for fitness businesses with multiple locations, franchise layers, and a lot of moving parts. At the time, that did not fit neatly into the frameworks many investors were using.

The people who got it fastest were usually from adjacent industries such as hospitality, franchising, or multi-site operations. They understood how difficult it is to run one location well, let alone hundreds across countries. In the end, we spent more energy building with customers than chasing capital, and that discipline probably helped us.

Founders often worry about the acqui-hire trap. How did you avoid becoming just another team absorbed into a larger platform?

I think that concern is completely fair. I have seen it happen. A founder joins, the knowledge gets absorbed, the roadmap quietly loses momentum, and a year later the product is little more than a feature buried in a bigger system.

My co-founder, Quaid Jawadwala, and I were very clear from the beginning that we were not looking for a conventional exit. We wanted a partner that would let us keep building and scale the business further, not one that simply wanted our team or customer list. That ruled out a lot of conversations quite quickly.

What stood out with Daxko was that it did not approach the business as something to flatten into one generic stack. It runs purpose-built platforms and puts real operators in charge of them. My role is an operating role, not a ceremonial title. Quaid is also deeply involved in expansion, engineering, and product. We did not join to hand over the keys. We joined to keep building.

India is a fragmented market. Where are you genuinely strongest, and how big can that opportunity become?

We are strongest in the mid-market and premium end of the fitness industry in India. That ranges from ambitious single-site operators to large franchise groups and multi-location brands. Those businesses do not want software built for some entirely different market and then awkwardly forced on to them.

What matters in India is not just feature depth but operational fit. Payments, taxation, compliance, franchise structures, and customer behaviour all have local specifics. Our product has done well because it handles those realities while still supporting global operating standards. That matters more as international brands enter India and need systems that respect how they already run elsewhere but can still adapt locally.

Also Read: Healthtech in South and Southeast Asia – Seeing beyond the “obvious”

We have also invested heavily in areas such as multi-location management, central reporting, automation, franchise operations, and governance. Those capabilities become more valuable as operators go from a handful of sites to dozens or more. I still think the market is early, especially as organised chains continue to expand.

Can you point to one market where getting local details right really made or broke a customer relationship?

Saudi Arabia is the clearest example for me. It taught us early that localisation is not a translation exercise. A lot of software companies thought adding Arabic and local payment support was enough. It was not.

Operators there needed ZATCA-compliant invoicing. They needed proper right-to-left workflows, not translated labels dropped into a product designed for left-to-right use. They also relied heavily on WhatsApp, not as a secondary tool but as a core channel for renewals, confirmations, receipts, and day-to-day member communication.

I remember one customer coming from a European platform where staff were effectively running key workflows outside the software. Renewals were tracked manually, confirmations were sent separately, and management had poor visibility because too much was happening in disconnected processes.

We approached that differently. We built WhatsApp into the membership journey, strengthened Arabic and right-to-left experiences, and backed it with local-language support teams. Adoption moved quickly because we were supporting how operators already worked rather than asking them to adapt to somebody else’s assumptions.

Which markets do you lead in today, and where are you still earlier in the journey?

India and the GCC are where we have the strongest footing today. In India, the product has been shaped by a very fragmented and operationally demanding market, which forced us to become practical and resilient. In the GCC, especially in markets such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, we earned traction by localising properly across language, tax, payments, communication habits, and support.

Australia and Southeast Asia are more mixed. We are making progress, but I would still describe them as earlier compared with India and the GCC. The demand is there. Operators are becoming more sophisticated, and franchise growth is creating a clearer need for enterprise-grade software. But those markets are not all moving at the same speed or in the same way.

The US is different again. It is a mature market with higher expectations and tougher competition, but Daxko gives us a much stronger position there than we would have had on our own.

What does the Southeast Asia go-to-market strategy actually look like? Direct sales, partners, or following global franchises into the region?

It is a mix, and the balance changes by country. One of the fastest paths into Southeast Asia is through global franchise brands already expanding across the region. Those operators want a platform that can move with them across borders without forcing a fresh implementation every time they enter a new market. That plays to our strengths.

At the same time, I do not think you can treat Southeast Asia as one market. The regulatory environment, payment rails, and fitness culture vary significantly from country to country. That is where a lot of expansion plans go wrong. People talk about the region as if it behaves like a single operating market, and it simply does not.

So yes, global franchise expansion is an important entry point, but local execution still matters. You need to respect what is different in each market rather than applying one template and hoping for the best.

FitnessForce built more than 1,100 APIs and leaned into a headless architecture. Was that strategic, or was it forced on you by customer complexity?

It was both, but the strategic view came first. Quaid had a strong conviction very early that the platform had to be API-first. That was not a pitch-deck decision. It came from the belief that serious operators would eventually need flexibility, integrations, custom member journeys, and the ability to connect systems across markets.

Also Read: The most-funded healthtech startups in Southeast Asia: A decade in review

Then reality reinforced the point. Once you support operators across India, the GCC, Southeast Asia, Australia, and beyond, you quickly run into different payment systems, compliance requirements, communication habits, and workflows. A closed platform would have meant saying no far too often.

So the API depth grew from both vision and necessity. A principle we kept was that the APIs we use internally should also be available to customers. Headless should not mean a few token integrations on the side. It should mean the product is genuinely extensible.

What is the honest version of what could still go wrong after the deal?

The honest answer is that the biggest risk is not hidden in a clause somewhere. It is a values mismatch. In most acquisitions, if the two sides think differently about customers, products, people, or decision-making, the legal protections only carry you so far.

That was the main thing I paid attention to. We spent a lot of time understanding how Daxko makes decisions, how it treats customers, and what kind of company it wants to be. The more time we spent together, the more aligned we seemed.

That does not mean there is no risk. Any integration has execution risk. Priorities can drift, communication can break down, and good intentions do not automatically produce good outcomes. I am just less worried about the classic founder fear of being absorbed and sidelined, because this did not feel like joining a company that wanted to erase what made us work in the first place.

The post SEA is growing up fast, but enterprise fitness tech still has homework to do appeared first on e27.