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The Dubai-founded company’s latest financing combines equity and debt as it expands a business built around managing trainers, sessions and gym operations.
Dubai-founded Enhance has raised $18.2 million in equity and venture debt to accelerate its expansion in the United States, putting a less visible part of the fitness industry in the spotlight: the systems that organise personal training once a member has joined a gym.
The financing, announced in September, includes equity participation from Global Ventures and venture debt from Stride Ventures. Enhance began as a personal training service in 2018. Its current expansion centres on enterprise software for gym operators, a different business from matching individual customers with a trainer.
That distinction matters to an industry whose headline membership numbers do not reveal how often customers buy coaching, how trainers spend their working hours or how reliably booked sessions turn into delivered services across individual clubs and larger networks with many separate locations. Enhance’s move into the US is a case study in exporting the operating systems developed inside a Gulf service business.
From local service to enterprise software
According to the funding announcement, Enhance’s enterprise software has been licensed in the US since January 2025. It names Crunch Fitness, In-Shape Family Fitness, UFC Gym and PureGym USA among chains using the technology. The company also operates across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain.
A consumer service and a software supplier face different expansion tasks. The first must recruit people and deliver appointments in each location. The second must make its system usable by organisations with their own staff, commercial arrangements and existing technology. A gym buying software is purchasing a way to organise its operation; the member is still buying a service delivered by a person.
Enhance’s public consumer website continues to describe a service that brings certified trainers to customers at home, in gyms and elsewhere. Its description of that business provides a useful counterpoint to the enterprise story. Both involve personal training, but the customer, delivery model and route to revenue are different. Counting app users alone would therefore give an incomplete picture of the company’s present activities.
Participation and intensity tell different stories
Independent US industry data explains why personal training deserves attention separately from gym membership. The Health & Fitness Association’s 2025 consumer study, covering activity in 2024, reported 77 million fitness-facility members and nearly 96 million total customers. Its findings drew on a nationally representative survey of 18,000 residents aged six and above.
Some 22.6% of members had worked with a personal trainer, while 32.3% had participated in small-group training. Yet the average member completed 21 personal training sessions during 2024, compared with 28 in 2019. Wider participation did not mean that each participant was purchasing or attending sessions more intensively.
For operators, those measures describe different parts of the business. A larger pool of coaching customers can coexist with fewer sessions per person. Trainer capacity, repeat bookings and the distribution of demand across the week consequently matter alongside the number of memberships sold. The survey concerns the US; it cannot be treated as a measurement of Gulf demand or Enhance’s own customer behaviour.
What the financing actually contains
The Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund separately announced an AED5.5 million credit guarantee for Enhance. Its stated purpose is to support expansion of the fitness platform and its trainer-management software for large gym operators. A credit guarantee is not the same instrument as an equity investment, and the dirham figure should not simply be added to the headline dollar round as though it were a separate cash injection.
The fund’s account describes more than 700 contracted gym locations globally, support for over 15,000 trainers and over 500,000 booked sessions a month. These are company-related operating figures, not independently audited measures of completed sessions or paying software seats. Their scope also matters: a contracted location, an active deployment and a fully operational site are not automatically interchangeable.
The mix of financing instruments reflects the company’s expansion model. Equity provides risk capital without a scheduled repayment of principal; debt creates a repayment obligation. The published round does not give a complete breakdown between the two. Without that breakdown, the total alone cannot establish the company’s cash runway or the economics of each new gym contract.
The operating model travels with the software
In an interview with Inc. Arabia, founder and CEO Tarek Mounir described the business as having developed through hands-on delivery before becoming a software platform. He also said the US rollout involved testing local economics rather than assuming that the Gulf model would transfer unchanged.
The interview distinguishes software provision from arrangements in which Enhance manages a partner’s personal training operation more extensively. That difference affects what a contract represents. Running an operation requires responsibilities beyond licensing a platform, including the processes surrounding staff, service delivery and the customer relationship.
The September financing is therefore about more than taking a consumer fitness app overseas. It funds the next stage of a business whose product has emerged from the practical work of running personal training. The next measurable development will be the conversion of that expanded footprint into sustained use and repeat contractual revenue, with software activity and service operations reported clearly enough to distinguish them.
