Female-Led & Well-Funded, Arketa Is Not Just Another Fit Tech Company
For Arketa, diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t just boxes to tick off, they’re a core part of the wellness software company’s identity
Being female-founded and run isn’t the only selling point for Arketa, a software platform for wellness studios, but it’s an important distinguishing factor for a startup operating in the crowded fit tech space.
Arketa’s software stack helps wellness businesses with routine tasks such as class bookings and payments, but it also helps studios to grow their business beyond classes by selling things like on-demand content, digital courses and events. Arketa also builds white-label mobile apps and websites for its customers. Thousands of fitness and wellness businesses currently use the platform.
Rachel Lea Fishman co-founded Arketa in 2020 after, while working as a yoga instructor, she noticed that boutique fitness and wellness studios were behind the times when it came to using technology to manage important business tasks and grow their revenue.
Fishman isn’t just the co-founder of Arketa, she serves as the company’s CEO. That kind of representation is important in the wellness industry, which has long been dominated by a majority-female clientele and is increasingly seeing women own studios. Despite that, the tech side of the wellness industry is still male-dominated.
“There are a lot of females helping studios, but there’s not another female CEO building in this space,” Fishman says.
For Arketa, diversity, equity and inclusion aren’t just boxes to tick off, they’re a core part of the company’s identity.
“It bleeds into everything we do, from our team being diverse across gender, race and sexual orientation to who we take on as investors,” Fishman explains. “Our leading investors are women and we take on diversity capital. That’s so important in this industry.”
In December, Arketa raised $7.6 million in a funding round led by First Round Capital and its partner, Hayley Barna.
Arketa’s customer base is 92% female, Fishman points out. Being female-led allows Arketa to help its customers solve problems and overcome obstacles a typical fitness and wellness software provider likely wouldn’t even know existed.
“I can relate to some of the life challenges studio owners might have,” Fishman says. “For example, women don’t have access to capital. So if you’re a studio owner who has multiple locations and is looking to scale, what are the things that you need to do when it comes to fundraising?”
“Balancing how you’re perceived as a woman in business can be really challenging for a lot of owners,” Fishman adds.
Beyond being female-led, Arketa boasts a software stack that it believes gives wellness studio owners all the tools they need to run their entire business. In addition to providing a seamless class-booking and check-in experience and automating payments and waivers, the platform helps studios grow their revenue in new and creative ways.
“In the post-pandemic world, studio owners are realizing that not only should they be selling classes, which Arketa supports, but they’re looking for new streams of revenue to help support their long-term vision,” Fishman says.
With Arketa, studio owners can access a single dashboard that allows them to easily sell group classes, private sessions both in-person and online, on-demand video content, events and retreats, and even set up their own ecommerce shop.
Arketa also builds white-label apps that give wellness businesses the power to manage their in-person and online services all in the same digital location. Studios can host a video library, sell programs and offer group classes all from their own branded app.
What truly sets Arketa apart though, Fishman believes, is the dedication she and her co-founder, Josh Archer, have to the wellness space.
Fishman fell in love with yoga while she was an undergraduate at UCLA using the modality to recover from knee injuries. She’s been a certified yoga instructor for years, and it was her experience working for and attending classes at different studios that inspired her to start a software company that could help wellness businesses thrive. Archer, who also attended UCLA, competed in the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, and shares a similar vision for how technology can help the world of wellness.
“When we’re not working on Arketa, we’re both obsessed with fitness and wellness,” Fishman says.
That dedication translates to a better and more thoughtfully designed product, Fishman believes.
“I feel a customer’s pain because I was the customer,” the Arketa co-founder says. “I think when you’re actually able to feel that pain, you’re able to build something so much better than if you’re just a tech person trying to build a cool product and viewing the customer as a number.”
As a result, there are certain nuances built into Arketa’s feature set that only people with experience in the industry would think to add. For example, when a studio member reaches certain “milestones,” like attending their 100th class, Arketa’s software automatically generates an email that goes out to the member. It also sends a notification to the front-desk person working at the studio that day, who gets nudged to congratulate the member on their achievement.
“A lot of people that don’t come from this industry miss the little things like that,” Fishman says.
While the fit tech space has become highly competitive over the last several years – studios are spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing business software – Arketa believes it offers the best product for the modern wellness studio.
“Execution is everything,” Fishman says. “Yeah, there’s a million and one people in this space. But there were a million and one people doing ride-sharing before Uber.”