The $600 Million Exit: Urban Sports Club Founders Tell the Full Story (Kreppel & Roth)

In 2013, Moritz Kreppel and Benjamin Roth started with 25 studios in Berlin and hand-cut plastic cards. Twelve years later, they sold Urban Sports Club to WellHub for roughly 600 million dollars — without ever running an active sale process. In between: a failed first startup, around ten acquisitions of their own, a funding round signed on the Friday before the Covid lockdown, and the late realization that they'd been far too greedy on margins.

In this episode, Moritz and Benni tell the complete story of their company — from fax lists in yoga studios all the way to the exit.

From a Failed Startup to an MVP You're Embarrassed By

Before Urban Sports Club, there was Benni's first startup, built around football halls. It crashed hard — "most of our savings were gone," he recalls. Ironically, the platform built in India for that failed venture became the very first Urban Sports Club software. The frontend showed a yoga class; the backend still ran on football court logic.

The actual launch happened in January 2013, with 25 studios in Berlin. No app, no investors — just hand-cut plastic cards and paper lists in the studios that got faxed in at the end of each month. Moritz sums it up: "If you're not embarrassed by the product you launch with, you waited too long. And we were very embarrassed."

Feedback was consistently positive — yet initially, nobody came. The problem: nobody was actively searching for this kind of product; it simply sounded "too good to be true." The real insight came later: what mattered wasn't the total number of studios, but density within each neighborhood.

Pricing, Unit Economics, and Why Margin Isn't Everything

One striking detail: the price of 59 euros per month has stayed unchanged since launch. To this day, studios pay nothing to be listed on the platform — keeping the barrier to entry for partners essentially at zero.

Looking back, Moritz says: "We were too greedy when it came to margins." They started out with 40 to 50 percent margin and have since come down to around 20 percent. The reason: in a platform ecosystem, higher margins choke growth on both sides — studios and members alike. They later saw the exact same pattern play out at the startups they acquired themselves.

That insight also drove the decision to raise venture capital, even though the original plan was to stay investor-free. The logic: "If you're making eight or nine euros per customer, you need a hell of a lot of customers." The model only works at extreme scale.

Funding, Acquisitions, and Hyper-Growth

Urban Sports Club's funding path was anything but conventional. It began with 20,000 euros from family and friends, followed by an angel round of 430,000 euros. That round wasn't put together by the founders themselves — it was assembled by the CEO of their biggest corporate client, who both invested personally and brought his own network along.

A key chapter in the growth story is the acquisition of Somuchmore, a Rocket Internet-backed competitor that scaled into six countries within eight to twelve months — and then collapsed. Kreppel and Roth spoke directly with its investors: HV Capital bought out the angels and made a fresh investment into Urban Sports Club. As Moritz puts it: "We basically buy the investors in."

The pressure from the zero-interest-rate era was very real. Moritz remembers: "I still recall having to justify to our board that we'd only hired 25 people in one month." The biggest lesson from that phase: too many manual workarounds, not enough focus on automation.

Covid, Restructuring, and the Exit to WellHub

One dramatic chapter in the company's history: the funding round from Friday, March 6, 2020. One signature from abroad was still missing, and someone suggested finishing it up on Monday. Kreppel and Roth insisted on waiting it out at the notary's office until everything was done. Good thing they did — Monday brought the lockdown in Germany. The funding round wouldn't have gone through anymore.

To manage the crisis that followed, they used a very concrete system: one whiteboard per stakeholder group on the wall. Members were offered the option to pause their membership at any time, day by day. For those who chose to stay, 80 percent of their fee went straight through to the studios. Despite all efforts, Italy and the Nordic markets eventually had to be shut down.

Twelve years after that first hand-cut plastic card, the company was sold to WellHub for roughly 600 million dollars — with no active sale process ever having taken place. In the conversation, Moritz and Benni also share what it feels like to suddenly become a corporate manager after the exit.