Like virtually every industry, fitness is in the midst of a seismic shift. Startups like Hydrow are pulling in massive nine-figure rounds of funding, old standbys like Peloton are forging new partnerships to keep users engaged, and Facebook (now Meta) is taking exercising into the metaverse.
At the same time, there has also been a big boom in the fitness creator and influencer economy, which is where NYC-based Talent Hack comes into the play.
With Talent Hack, fitness experts can sell their classes, find work opportunities on the app’s job board, secure brand partnerships, attend tailored educational programs, and manage their overall business. The goal, says founder and CEO Alexandra Bonetti, is to “patch together” the various services other similar apps offer, and provide everything in one place.
“This is a black box of an industry. There’s no clear career path in this industry, you just kind of have to figure it out on your own. So we help them do that,” Bonetti told Built In.
Bonetti is certainly no stranger to the challenges of the fitness and wellness industry. Before founding Talent Hack, she owned and operated her own fitness studio here in New York for about a decade. In that time, she says she found that the instructors were the driving force behind the success of the industry — putting together classes, maintaining relationships with clients — but the industry itself was not set up in a way to recognize, reward or compensate these instructors accordingly.
“We build technology, paired with education, that really propels [instructors’] careers forward and, maybe most importantly, puts them in the driver’s seat,” Bonetti added. “We are here to serve creators. That’s what we care about.”
Recently, Talent Hack’s efforts have caught the attention of Emergence Capital, which just led a $17 million Series A investment into the startup. This is the VC giant’s first-ever investment in a Latina-led company, and is reportedly the largest Series A for a Latina-led software startup.
“We believe the new generation of iconic tech companies will be led by diverse CEOs who can connect with and understand their target market from a unique vantage point,” Lotti Siniscalco, a principal at Emergence Capital, said in a statement. “There is nobody better positioned to go after this $10 billion opportunity than Alexandra, and we could not be more thrilled to be partnering with her.”
The fresh funding brings Talent Hack’s total capital raised to $22 million, which makes it the most well-funded creator platform in its industry, according to the company. It also caps off a year of tremendous growth, with the number of creators using the platform tripling in just the last quarter.
Of course, Bonetti says a lot of this recent success can be attributed to the global pandemic and its effects on the fitness and wellness industry. According to Bonetti, this “unbundling” of the gym and the larger creator economy has been progressing for years, but was accelerated by the pandemic.
“The pandemic definitely was a catalyst to talent realizing that they can build businesses without gyms without gyms and studios as a middleman,” Bonetti said. “It was also a good wake-up moment for clients to realize that they can also transact directly with the people who drive them to work out, without having a gym in the middle.”
Looking ahead, Talent Hack will use this fresh funding to grow its team and expand its suite of tools to address the needs of what Bonetti refers to as the burgeoning “well-care economy.” Essentially, she anticipates that the health industry will be focused less on treating issues, and more about preventing them from happening in the first place, and she thinks fitness and wellness will be a “critical piece” in that.
“The industry is in, like, a palpable movement. There is so much growth, it’s changing so much. Even the words ‘fitness’ and ‘wellness’ don’t seem to describe what the industry is evolving to,” Bonetti said “We’re at the beginning. The tip of the iceberg. And I think that being a part of shaping that and being able to impact the creators who, ultimately, are the engine of that impact is really rewarding.”
