Community-based fitness startup Sweatpals raised $12 million in a recent funding round, which was led by venture capital firms Patron, a16z speedrun, and Kevin Hart's HartBeat Ventures.
“When I first saw Sweatpals, I immediately recognized it as the future of how we connect,” Hart said in a Sweatpals statement. “As someone who’s built my career on bringing people together through entertainment, I see Sweatpals doing the same thing through fitness. They’re leading a movement that makes wellness accessible, social, and fun, and it’s exactly the kind of innovation that excites me as an investor.”
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Founded in 2022, Sweatpals is a social fitness and wellness platform that allows users to discover events happening in their communities. Hosts, which can be individuals or other companies, use the platform to promote their events and manage everything on the backend, from marketing to liability waivers to ticket sales.
“We’re building the infrastructure for human connection in an increasingly lonely world,” Sweatpals founder and CEO Salar Shahini said in the statement. “This funding allows us to accelerate our vision where every gym, studio, park, and community space becomes a hub for meaningful relationships – where daylife becomes as iconic as nightlife once was.”
Community is at "the heart of the [Sweatpals] experience," Shahini told Business Insider. It's this real-life relationship building that he and co-founder Mandi Zhou say set their app apart from other ticketing and fitness platforms.
“We want to build loyalty,” Shahini said.
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Thus far, the strategy has worked for Sweatpals. For experienced hosts on the platform, nearly two-thirds of participants in their events return.
“Retention is driven by friendship,” Amber Atherton, a partner at Patron, told BI. “You’re coming back because you’ve made friends … versus going to a yoga class where you’re not talking to anybody.”
While hosts focus on making their fitness and wellness events the kinds of experiences people want to return to, Sweatpals is focused on making running those events as easy as possible for the hosts.
“We realized without the hosts … none of these experience exists,” Shahini told BI. “We should really make them super successful, and that way they will bring the pals.”
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“What excites us most is how Sweatpals empowers everyday people to become community leaders and entrepreneurs,” Zhou said in a statement earlier this week. “We’re seeing yoga instructors, run club organizers, and fitness enthusiasts turn their passion into purpose – building communities that truly change lives.”
Currently, Sweatpals has around 1 million monthly users and 4,500 hosts, BI reports. The company says it plans to use some of the new funding to expand into 12 new markets by early 2026, which could grow those numbers considerably.
“Sweatpals is turning wellness into the new social currency,” Atherton said in the Sweatpals statement. “They’re bridging tech, community, and culture to create lasting change in how people connect – that’s a movement worth backing.”
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