Years spent behind check-in desks at yoga studios across California taught Rachel Lea Fishman one thing: The industry was in need of a warm up.
“Part of working behind the desk is seeing all the softwares that you either love, or love to hate,” she said. Fishman found herself falling into the latter thanks to the archaic and fragmented tools to check clients in, charge them for classes, answer their FAQs, and market to new students. To make the process easier for studio owners and instructors alike, she cofounded Arketa, a software company that helps fitness studios better manage operations in 2020. This March, Arketa closed a $15 million Series A, led by Inspired Capital, bringing their total funding to nearly $23 million.
But, like any fitness class, Arketa’s journey had its fair share of tough positions. A month after she joined forces with her cofounder Josh Archer (both of whom made the 30 Under 30 list in 2024) to officially launch the software in February 2020, Covid hit. And in-person fitness studios—their primary user base—shut down.
Instead of pausing operations, however, they pivoted to meet the changing demands of the industry.
“Covid took the chessboard that was the fitness industry and totally flipped it on its head,” she said. “Instructors used to think, ‘I have to work for a big box gym in order to teach,’ and studio owners used to think ‘I can only open up 10 studios in order to scale,’ and ‘If I switch from my dinosaur software, the whole world is going to go upside down.’”
But in hindsight, Covid became a necessary push to change the way fitness instructors and studios operated, and Arketa began building technologies to support the new wave. They launched tools for digital teaching libraries, virtual classes, and more. From the beginning it was built as fully-white labeled software to accommodate for the variety of ways Covid-era studios connected with clients. And to this day, Arketa continues to support fitness studios and other wellness spaces—from cold plunges to cryotherapy treatment centers—regardless of what types of services they provide, or where.
The fully-customizable features set them apart from competitors like MindBody (one of the biggest class booking platforms today), because studios can seamlessly integrate Arketa into their stack.
“You remember the makeup brand that was like, ‘Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it’s Mabelline?’” Fishman said. “That’s like Arketa. You don't know unless you know, because it is so white labeled.”
To continue innovating, Arketa is now focused on implementing AI to make the processes even smoother. That’s what much of their new funding is going to support.
Fishman initially used AI to help the internal Arketa team be more productive across engineering and marketing. Now they’re using AI for client-facing chatbots (that will answer FAQs like “do you have showers” or “what’s the parking like” in 30 seconds or less), generating leads to their studios, and more.
If a small business is “not picking up on AI and capturing all these new technologies, they’re just falling behind,” Fishman said. Her goal is to prevent that from happening.
See you next week,
Alex & Zoya | 
