This startup is betting on fitness events to help people find friends in the AI era — and it just raised $12 million

• Sweatpals is a social app for fitness and wellness experiences.
• Founded in 2022, Sweatpals is expanding to more US markets and adding studios and gyms to its app.
• The startup told Business Insider exclusively that it raised $12 million in seed funding.

Consuming too much AI slop these days?

Sweatpals, a social fitness and wellness event platform, wants to help people get off their phones and to in-real-life (IRL) experiences where they can meet new friends.

"AI is going to build the internet and the online world," Sweatpals CEO Salar Shahini told Business Insider in an interview. "But someone needs to build the offline world — and working out is a very big part of that."

Founded in 2022 by Shahini and Mandi Zhou, Sweatpals lets people discover events happening nearby, such as outdoor yoga classes, cold plunge or sauna activities, and group hikes. Hosts — who can be individuals, groups, or studios — can use the platform to run their businesses, managing everything from ticket sales, memberships, SMS and email marketing, to liability waivers.

Armed with fresh funding, Sweatpals is expanding into more US markets and developing its product offerings for gyms and studios.

The startup exclusively told Business Insider that it raised a $12 million seed round led by venture capital firms Patron, A16z Speedrun, and Kevin Hart's HartBeat Ventures, bringing the startup's total funding to $17.2 million. The round included investments from angels like Instacart cofounder Max Mullen and WndrCo's Jeffrey Katzenberg, and participation from VC funds Antler and Pear.

"We were very competitively trying to win the deal," said Amber Atherton, a partner at Patron, who has been eyeing startups tackling how people socialize in the AI era. "Sweatpals fit very squarely in that thesis area for us: How are people going to make friendships, relationships?"

The typical Sweatpals user, about 60% of whom are women, is a young adult between 20 and 35 years old. The platform has more than 1 million monthly users, Shahini said, and about 170,000 weekly users.

Communities on the app, which can be run by individual hosts or gyms, are the "heart of the experience," Shahini said. The startup also sees this as what sets it apart from other event, ticketing, or fitness apps. The app encourages users to join a community where there will be recurring events, a feed to share content, and ways to connect directly with people in that group.

"We want to build loyalty," Shahini said.

For the app's "mature hosts," about two-thirds of their participants are returning to events, Shahini added.

"Retention is driven by friendship," Atherton said. "You're coming back because you've made friends … versus going to a yoga class where you're not talking to anybody."

How Sweatpals makes money

Sweatpals initially focused on its social features for consumers — called "pals" on the app — but Shahini said the company's recent prioritization of business tools for hosts was a "big boost" for the startup.

"We realized without the hosts … none of these experience exists," Shahini said. "We should really make them super successful, and that way they will bring the pals."

Shahini describes the app's current form as an IRL "fitness experience marketplace" where hosts share events, and people can easily discover events or join communities. Some experiences are free, but most are ticketed. The higher end could be thousands for a retreat, but the median cost is around $30, the company said.

Sweatpals takes a cut from ticket sales on the platform, typically on the consumer end. It has two tiers for hosts: a starter tier, which adds a 6% fee to tickets, and its pro tier, which adds a 3% fee. Sweatpals also charges a 20% commission on the first booking the app brings to a host through its own marketing or discovery feed in the app.

The platform has about 4,500 hosts, Shahini said.

According to the company, hosts earn an average of about $70,000 annually from the Sweatpals app, and the top 1% of hosts make about $2 million a year.

In addition to platform fees, Sweatpals is also expanding into brand partnerships as a revenue stream, Shahini said. That would include getting hosts and their events sponsored by brands.

The push for IRL social

Sweatpals is at the center of two trends shaping tech and culture right now: wellness and IRL experiences.

People are meeting the loves of their lives at run clubs and networking in saunas. Strava, the popular running app, announced it acquired two fitness startups this year and is eyeing an IPO. Numerous IRL social startups have launched in the past few years with the goal of getting people to gather and meet up instead of scrolling online. Larger companies are also tapping into the trend, like Airbnb, which rolled out new "experiences" and social features this year (and recently announced a partnership with Strava on "run-cations").

Following these trends, Sweatpals pitches itself as an alternative to nightlife with what it calls "daylife." Some data shows that drinking among US adults is on the decline, and Shahini said he sees Sweatpals as a tool for the people who wake up in the wee hours of the morning to work out, who "get their high" from fitness, "versus through drinking."