Yet another Indian unicorn is preparing to go public.
Cult.fit, the Bengaluru-based fitness chain founded by Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal and former Flipkart executive Ankit Nagori, has filed its draft red herring prospectus with SEBI, setting the stage for what could be one of the more closely watched consumer listings of the year.
The company is looking to raise up to Rs. 950 crore through a fresh issue of shares. Alongside this, existing investors plan to offload up to 178.6 million shares through an offer for sale, meaning the total size of the IPO will end up considerably larger once the offer for sale portion is priced. Reports earlier this month had pegged the overall issue at anywhere between Rs. 3,500 crore and Rs. 4,000 crore, so the eventual number should become clearer once the price band is announced.
The offer for sale list reads like a who’s who of Cult.fit’s cap table. Temasek’s investment arm MacRitchie Investments tops the list, planning to sell over 2.4 crore shares. Fitness First Luxembourg, IDG Ventures, Tata Digital and Chiratae Trust are among the other institutional sellers, while co-founder Mukesh Bansal himself is selling over 1.6 crore shares and former co-founder Bruno Eduard Raschle is offloading over 1 crore shares. Notably, Ankit Nagori, who co-founded the company with Bansal in 2016, does not appear among the top sellers, having reportedly exited the venture some years ago to pursue his own health-food startup.
Cult.fit’s draft papers describe it as a professionally managed company with no identifiable promoter, a structural detail that also explains why the offer is being made under Regulation 6(2) of SEBI’s ICDR norms rather than the standard promoter-led route.
The company has come a long way from its early days running yoga and CrossFit classes out of a handful of Bengaluru centres. It now operates 708 fitness centres across India and counts nearly a million paid members, built up over the years through acquisitions including Gold’s Gym’s India operations and a chain of Fitness First clubs. Along the way it also picked up serious institutional backing — Tata Digital invested Rs. 550 crore into the company in 2021, a deal that came with Bansal taking on the additional role of president at Tata Digital, and Temasek has topped up its stake multiple times since, most recently with a Rs. 440 crore round in March.
That capital came at a cost. Cult.fit spent much of the last decade burning through cash to fund its expansion, and the pandemic years were particularly brutal — the company laid off hundreds of employees across 2020 as gyms shut down nationwide, and trimmed its workforce again in 2024 as part of a broader push toward profitability. That push appears to have paid off: the company is said to have turned EBITDA-positive in the final quarter of FY26, which likely gave its board the confidence to finally push the button on an IPO that had been rumoured for years.
Cult.fit says it plans to use the fresh issue proceeds to fund new centres and put money behind branding and marketing, a fairly standard playbook for a consumer business trying to convince public market investors of its growth story after years of losses. The company was last valued at around Rs. 12,650 crore, or $1.37 billion, according to Tracxn, and its listing comes at a moment when Indian consumers are increasingly willing to pay for gyms, wellness apps and preventive healthcare, a shift that has also fuelled the rise of rivals in the space.
The IPO adds Cult.fit to a growing list of Indian startups testing public markets this year, in a stretch that’s also expected to include much larger offerings from Jio Platforms and the National Stock Exchange. Whether investors reward Cult.fit’s growth-over-profit history the way they’ve rewarded some of its consumer internet peers remains to be seen, though the EBITDA turnaround certainly gives the company a cleaner story to sell than it would have had a year or two ago.