Friday, 27 December 2019

Report: ClassPass is hunting for unicorn status in a new funding round

The nearly seven-year-old, New York-based fitness subscription app ClassPass is reportedly trying to raise $285 million in a new funding round that would push its valuation to more than $1 billion.

The company will issue 22.7 million Series E shares as part of the funding round, according to a securities filing obtained by Reuters from analytics firm Lagniappe Labs.

We’ve reached out to the company for more information.

According to TC’s sources, ClassPass has been in fundraising mode since at least early fall.

The company — which began life as a way for people to book classes across different fitness studios and has more recently been pushing a corporate business that sees it adding ClassPass to employee benefit packages — is right now valued at $536.4 million, according to Reuters, which cites the Prime Unicorn Index.

Its backers include the Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek and Alphabet, along with General Catalyst, Thrive Capital and Acequia Capital.

To date, the company has raised roughly $240 million from investors altogether, according to Crunchbase.

ClassPass was founded by Payal Kadakia, who is now the company’s executive chairman. She stepped aside in 2017 to make room for Fritz Lanman, the company’s former executive chairman and co-operator and now CEO.

Lanman acknowledged in an interview with Fortune earlier this year that the company has endured some ups and downs in its time. Though it originally charged $99 per month for an unlimited number of fitness classes in New York, it was forced to raise prices before more recently instituting fluctuating class prices based on a demand (and the availability of classes) of a particular studio. The end result: Customers currently pay between $9 and $199 per month for between 10 and 130 credits that can be spent on classes.

As for its corporate memberships, it currently promises not just classes and a way to customize programs for employees but also streaming audio and video workouts. The last owes to an investment the company made in a broadcast studio, from which it built a library of on-demand video workouts. TC covered that development back in 2018.

The company closed its most recent round of funding, an $85 million Series D round, in July 2018.



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