Kholoud Hussein
Before long, fitness was viewed primarily as a lifestyle choice across much of the Middle East. Today, it has become a fast-growing economic sector attracting investment, driving entrepreneurship, and reshaping consumer spending habits. Across the GCC, rising health awareness, supportive government policies, and the expansion of modern fitness facilities have transformed wellness from a niche market into a mainstream industry. In Saudi Arabia particularly, Vision 2030 has accelerated this shift, helping create one of the region's fastest-growing fitness markets while encouraging greater participation across all demographics, especially women.
As the sector matures, attention is increasingly turning toward the technology infrastructure that powers gyms, personal trainers, and fitness operators. Beyond opening new fitness centers, the industry is entering a phase where operational efficiency, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and scalable digital platforms are becoming key drivers of growth and profitability. This evolution is creating significant opportunities for companies capable of bridging the gap between fitness services and technology.
Among the companies leading this transformation is Enhance, a Middle East-born fitness platform that has evolved from a regional service provider into a global technology player. Operating across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United States, the company now supports more than 15,000 personal trainers and facilitates over half a million training sessions every month. Through its Enterprise SaaS and AI-powered platform, Enhance Tech, the company is helping gym operators improve trainer performance, increase profitability, and better manage one of the industry's most valuable yet historically underutilized revenue streams: personal training.
As Enhance expands its footprint beyond the GCC and deepens its presence in the United States, the company is positioning itself at the intersection of fitness, artificial intelligence, and enterprise software. Its journey reflects broader trends reshaping the global wellness economy, where technology is increasingly becoming the foundation for scalable growth and long-term value creation.
In this exclusive interview with Sharikat Mubasher, Tarek Mounir, Founder and CEO of Enhance, discusses the company's evolution from a Dubai-based startup into a global fitness technology platform, the growing demand for personal training across Saudi Arabia and the GCC, the role of AI in transforming gym operations, the company's expansion strategy in the US and beyond, and how Enhance aims to become the global operating standard for personal training in the years ahead.
Enhance has scaled rapidly across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, while also expanding into the United States. How would you describe the company's current operating model, and what has been the key driver behind this cross-market growth?
Enhance is the operating system for personal training (PT). We help large gym chains turn PT from an afterthought into a predictable, profitable revenue stream — which in the high-volume, low-price (HVLP) segment is something almost nobody has cracked.
We started in Dubai in 2018 as a service business. Eight years later, we cover 700+ contracted gym locations globally — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and now the US — supporting 15,000 trainers and over 500,000 booked sessions a month. Revenue has compounded at 65% CAGR since 2019.
The more important shift is the shape of the business. We went from a regional service layer into a SaaS platform that any multi-site gym operator can deploy. That super-sized our addressable market; from Gulf gym chains up into a $1.8 billion global PT management software category; with the US and UK alone worth $800 million. The GCC gave us the operational history and the proven unit economics. The US is where we're deploying them at scale.
With more than 15,000 personal trainers on the platform and over half a million monthly sessions booked, what does this level of activity reveal about demand trends in the fitness economy across the GCC?
The numbers reflect a structural shift in how GCC consumers approach health. A PT client in Dubai, in 2018, typically came in asking for weight loss before a wedding or a summer holiday. The same client today asks about strength, recovery, energy, and long-term healthspan. That vocabulary shift happened in under a decade.
Saudi Arabia is the most significant data point. Vision 2030 opened the fitness category, and the pace of adoption — particularly among women — has been dramatic. We're seeing more first-time formal fitness participants in KSA right now than in any other market we operate in. Consumer demand there is outpacing the supply of qualified trainers, which tells you the ceiling is still far above where the market is today.
Session volumes reflect PT’s transition from a premium add-on to a mainstream service. Over 500,000 booked sessions a month is not a niche conversation — it's a category.
Your Enterprise SaaS and AI-powered product, Enhance Tech, is gaining traction in the US market. What gap in the global gym industry are you addressing, and why do you believe this solution has not been built at scale before?
PT is a $42 billion global market, and most gym operators still lose money on it. The industry runs on whiteboards, spreadsheets and gut feel. Trainer churn sits around 70% a year. Fewer than 15% of free trial sessions convert into paying clients. Operators have almost no visibility into what is actually happening on the gym floor.
No one has solved this at scale because it requires two things that are genuinely hard to combine: deep operational experience running PT inside gyms, and the engineering capability to abstract that into software. Most software companies don't understand the gym floor. Most gym operators don't build software. We have spent eight years doing both, simultaneously.
The AI layer works because the dataset works first. We process over 500,000 PT sessions a month across 700+ gyms. Every session is a data point on what makes trainers successful, why members stay or leave, and where revenue leaks out. A new entrant would need almost a decade of operational history to rebuild that. That's not something you shortcut with capital.
The performance metrics you've shared — 20% more sessions per trainer, a 17% increase in operating margins, and over 40% improvement in trainer retention — are significant. From an investor's perspective, how do these metrics translate into long-term value creation for gym operators?
Each metric hits a different line on the P&L, so they compound in a meaningful way for operators and investors.
The 20% increase in sessions per trainer is a revenue multiplier — the same headcount produces materially more output. The 17-percentage-point improvement in operating margin at mature sites makes PT much more of a profit engine for gyms. The retention number is the one investors tend to underweight the impact of: when trainer churn drops from the 70% industry norm to under 30%, operators are spared having to absorb constant rehiring and retraining costs, and clients stop churning with their trainer.
Put together, the model creates a gym that earns more from PT, spends less running it, and retains the people who deliver it. At mature sites we see PT revenue around $85,000 per club per month. That's the long-term value case — and it's why operators stay on the platform once they're on it.
Can you walk us through Enhance's funding journey to date? What type of investors have backed the company, and how are you positioning the business for future funding rounds or strategic partnerships?
We bootstrapped the early years deliberately. Taking outside capital before the unit economics were proven would have meant scaling the wrong thing faster. Once the model worked, we raised.
We've taken around $21 million to date. Our cap table includes Global Ventures — MENA's leading venture firm — alongside other institutional backers who understand the regional market and the global ambition.
We are in conversations with investors who recognize now as particularly ideal timing, as we accelerate our US rollout, deepen the product, and move from a proven regional operator into the default PT infrastructure for large gym chains globally.
The thesis is straightforward — PT is a $42 billion market with no system of record or operating standard. We're building it. The strategic partnerships we're pursuing in the US reflect the same logic: enterprise gym groups looking for an operator they can trust to run PT end-to-end, not just provide software.
Saudi Arabia is undergoing rapid transformation in its fitness and wellness sector under Vision 2030. How central is the Kingdom to your growth strategy, and what specific expansion plans do you have in this market?
Saudi Arabia is our highest-growth market and one of the most important in the world for this category. Vision 2030 did not just open a new segment — it catalysed a generational shift in how Saudi consumers relate to health and fitness. Current participation rates, particularly among women, would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
For Enhance, the KSA opportunity is both a consumer-side and enterprise-side story. For consumers, demand for qualified personal training is expanding faster than supply — the market constraint is the talent gap, not regulation or the willingness to pay. That creates a strong case for a platform that helps gym operators find, train, and retain good trainers at scale.
On the enterprise side, the large gym groups expanding aggressively across the Kingdom need infrastructure to run PT profitably — and the franchise model driving much of that expansion is exactly where our platform performs best. We're working with operators who are building for a ten-year horizon, and so are we.
Beyond the GCC and the US, which markets are you prioritising next, and what factors determine your market-entry strategy — regulation, consumer behaviour, or enterprise demand?
Enterprise demand drives the sequence, and then we assess the other factors. We follow large gym chains — if a group we already work with is expanding into a new market, that's a faster path to traction than building from scratch against an unfamiliar operator landscape.
As for what's next: the UK is a natural priority. It's the largest gym market in Europe, has strong HVLP penetration, and there is a significant shared-language advantage in how we build and sell the product. Beyond that, Southeast Asia and markets like Australia are interesting over a 24–36 month horizon — high gym penetration, growing PT adoption, and early-stage software infrastructure in the gym sector.
Regulation matters less than it might initially appear. Personal training is not a heavily regulated category in most markets. Consumer behaviour matters more — specifically, whether PT has reached the inflection point from premium to mainstream in a given market. Our GCC experience tells us that once that shift starts, it moves quickly.
As you continue to scale both your consumer platform and enterprise SaaS offering, how do you see Enhance evolving over the next three to five years — particularly in terms of AI integration, product development, and global market positioning?
The three-to-five year vision is to be the system of record and operating standard for personal training globally — the platform gym operators default to, the way hotel groups default to property management software or restaurants default to reservation systems. That category doesn't exist yet. We're building it.
On AI specifically: the tools already live include at-risk client detection that flags members before they churn, and a trainer coaching layer benchmarking every trainer, so managers know exactly who to develop. An AI sales agent and a daily AI management brief follow later this year — with ranked morning instructions for each gym manager, rather than a dashboard requiring interpretation.
The advantage is not the models themselves. Every platform will have access to good models. The advantage is the eight years of operational history behind ours — over 500,000 sessions a month across 700+ gyms, compounding daily. That data set gets harder to replicate every quarter.
On global positioning: the US establishes us as a credible global operator, not just a GCC success story. That matters for enterprise deals, for the fundraising narrative, and for the category we're defining. The ambition, simply stated, is to be the company that built the global infrastructure for PT — and to have done it from the UAE.
