One in 75 Latin Americans passes through Smart Fit's platform. Founder Edgard Corona on why he built his own aggregator.

Every large gym chain watched corporate benefit platforms take a share of their members and negotiated over the terms. Edgard Corona built his own instead, lost money on it for years, and now holds more than a third of that market in Brazil. He founded Smart Fit in 1996 and built it into the largest fitness operator in Latin America, more than 2,000 clubs across 16 countries, and moved to chairman in March when his son took over as chief executive.

The season was brought to you by Zing Coach.

In this conversation:

• Why the cost of money in Latin America, not strategy, decides how many clubs he owns

• What a low-cost operator has to change before it can open in Morocco

• Why a gym group is buying its own NVIDIA hardware instead of renting compute

• What he thinks every large chain got wrong about aggregators, and what it cost them

• Where the model behind all of this actually came from, and it is not fitness

• What has to be true before a gym chain can call itself a health company

Chapters:

00:00 One in 75 Latin Americans is on the platform

00:27 Who he is and what he is building

01:23 What Smart Fit actually is, and where it goes next

02:38 Why he owns eight in ten clubs instead of franchising

03:24 What travels into a new market and what does not

04:15 Where new concepts get tested before they reach a budget club

04:59 The part of the experience nobody is building yet

05:21 Why a gym chain built its own aggregator

07:09 What it takes to put a rival gym on your platform

08:19 Build or buy, and the cost of capital behind it

09:35 The mistake he thinks the industry made

10:11 The members who had never trained anywhere

11:13 What stops a gym chain becoming a health company

11:52 What he took from Life Time, and the wearable plan

13:55 From fingerprints to face recognition at the door

14:37 Ten years out

15:03 One decision

Links:

• Edgard Corona on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn

• Tomorrow Health website

• Apply to join FitTech Club

• Zing Coach

Season 2 opener, brought to you by Zing Coach. Only 22 percent of people ever try a personal trainer, says Zing Coach CEO Anton Marchanka.

Personal training is the most effective retention tool a club has, and almost nobody buys it. Anton Marchanka puts the lifetime trial rate at around 22 percent, and says the reason is structural: there are not enough trainers to meet the demand, and the ones who exist cost more than the membership. He runs Zing Coach, which built a consumer AI coaching app and now licenses the model into clubs including New York Sports Clubs, and he ran Daily Burn before that, so he has operated both sides of that line.

In this conversation:

• Why he charges operators per active member rather than per location, and why the price per member falls as usage rises
• What Zing Coach had to unlearn from the consumer business before the first club deployment worked
• Why high-value-low-price clubs and boutiques buy the same product for opposite reasons
• Who the product does not work for, in his own words
• What integration actually costs an operator, in a number he gives on the record

Chapters:

00:00 The 22 percent who ever try a personal trainer

00:52 Why Daily Burn pushed him off the mobile-only path

02:43 What 850,000 paying users showed about retention

03:50 Not enough trainers, and too expensive

05:18 What selling into gyms forced him to unlearn

06:59 Who this does not work for

07:18 Charging per active member, not per location

09:03 Why budget clubs and boutiques buy this for opposite reasons

12:04 The consumer app as a testing ground

13:02 Strength training, AI adoption and community

15:27 What integration actually costs

15:58 What operators get wrong on day one

18:08 The gym floor as a guided experience

Links:

• Anton Marchanka on LinkedIn
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health website
• Apply to join FitTech Club

A prescribed health app in Germany sells for 200 euros. Adham Kassab, COO of haelsi, on where 120 of it goes.

Germany lets public health insurers pay for a prescribed app. That sounds like the easiest distribution deal in consumer health until you price the entry: an information security certification, an audit, a randomised controlled trial, ongoing reporting, and a further charge every time you change the product. And once you are listed, the person using the app is not the person paying for it.

Adham Kassab ran Selfapy, one of Germany's best known prescribed digital therapy companies for mental health, through its sale to MEDICE. He is now Chief Operations Officer at haelsi in Vienna, a network of health centres that sells corporate memberships, rents capacity to doctors and builds its own digital services on top. He has run the software side and the physical side of the same market.

In this conversation:

- Why prescribed health apps in Germany cluster around the same price, and what is actually left per order

- Why "customer" is the wrong word in healthcare, and which of the three stakeholders blocks the deal

- Why most digital health products have not reached profitable unit economics

- Why doctors stopped being persuaded by downloads, retention and engagement

- What the fitness industry has to prove before an insurer will pay for strength training, and the one step a gym operator can take this week

Recorded in early 2026.

Chapters:

00:00 Three people in a restaurant: who is the customer

00:12 Unit economics and how fitness gets paid, in brief

01:26 What Selfapy is, in plain terms

03:12 Three tiers of health app, and only one gets reimbursed

04:40 One orders, one eats, one pays, and what listing costs

06:10 200 euros per prescription, 80 euros of margin

07:18 haelsi: centres, corporate memberships and doctor rentals

09:39 GLP-1, muscle loss and why there are no fitness partners

11:05 Why doctors do not prescribe strength training

11:31 What fitness has to prove, and one step to take this week

14:29 What a clinic chain and a therapy app share

15:40 Outcome-based reimbursement changes the top metric

16:53 Big tech in health: more potential, not more effectiveness

17:26 Consumerization is not reversible

18:15 Pulse check: seven questions, seven answers

Links:

• Adham Kassab on LinkedIn
• Haelsi
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club