Resistance training has quietly become the dominant modality across global gym floors. Members are lifting more, programming more deliberately, and demanding more from the experience. The software layer, though, has never caught up. That gap is now closing fast, and the companies closing it aren't the ones you'd expect.
A new cohort of startups, including Suji, Kyla, and Fort, is building technology specifically architected around strength. Not recovery dashboards. Not step counts. Actual real-time coaching, load management, and progressive overload logic designed for the weight room. For gym operators and equipment manufacturers, this represents both a significant opportunity and a credible threat.
A Segment That Was Always Underserved
The numbers make the opportunity obvious. The global fitness industry generated roughly $96.7 billion in revenue in 2023, supported by approximately 184 million fitness facility members worldwide. A meaningful share of those members are there to lift. And yet the technology built to serve them has lagged years behind what's available to cyclists, runners, and sleep-trackers.
Cardio got connected hardware. Recovery got sophisticated biometrics. Strength got spreadsheets and YouTube. That imbalance wasn't sustainable, and the startups entering this space are betting it's finally correcting.
Suji is developing AI-driven form analysis and rep tracking using computer vision, targeting both individual users and gym operators who want to offer coaching at scale. Kyla is building a strength-specific coaching platform that adapts programming based on session performance data, essentially creating a personalized coach that lives in your pocket. Fort is approaching the problem from the hardware side, with connected strength equipment designed to integrate directly with coaching software and operator dashboards.
Each approach is distinct, but they share a common thesis: strength training optimization deserves its own technology stack, not a feature bolted onto a general wellness app.
The Wearable Gap These Startups Are Targeting
It's worth understanding what the existing wearable leaders aren't doing. Magic Leap, Oura, and WHOOP rank among the top-funded wearable startups by total capital raised. Their products are genuinely impressive. But their core value proposition is built around recovery, readiness, and sleep quality. They tell you whether you're prepared to train. They don't coach you through the session itself.
That's not a criticism. It's a product positioning decision. But it leaves a specific and valuable gap: real-time strength session coaching, set-by-set load recommendations, and in-workout feedback. As WHOOP and Ultrahuman demonstrate where wearable investment is concentrating, the money is flowing toward subscription platforms built on biometric data. Strength performance data is a different category entirely, and it's largely unclaimed.
This is where Suji, Kyla, and Fort are planting their flags. They're not competing with WHOOP on recovery metrics. They're building the layer that WHOOP explicitly doesn't serve.
The Cardio Parallel Operators Can't Afford to Ignore
If you're running a gym, a fitness equipment brand, or a vertical investing in either, there's a historical pattern worth studying carefully. Between roughly 2012 and 2018, connected hardware companies including Peloton and iFIT restructured the entire cardio equipment category. Traditional treadmill and bike manufacturers had the hardware relationships, the retail footprint, and the brand recognition. What they didn't have was software. They lost significant margin to platform players who understood that the recurring revenue was in the content and coaching layer, not the machine itself.
Peloton's pricing strategy in connected fitness illustrates exactly how that dynamic plays out at scale. The hardware becomes the entry point. The software subscription becomes the business. Brands that treated the two as separable found themselves competing on price for the lower-margin half of the equation.
Strength equipment brands face an identical fork in the road right now. The question isn't whether AI-driven coaching will become a standard expectation on the gym floor. It will. The question is who owns that layer when it gets there.
Three Strategic Choices for Operators and Brands
For gym operators and equipment manufacturers watching this space, the strategic options are reasonably clear, even if none of them is without risk.
- License third-party software. Partner with a startup like Suji or Kyla and integrate their coaching layer into your existing floor experience. Lower upfront cost, faster deployment, but you're building your member experience on someone else's platform. If that platform gets acquired or raises prices, your leverage is limited.
- Build proprietary tools. Invest in developing your own strength coaching software, either internally or through a dedicated product team. You retain the platform relationship with your members, but the development timeline and cost are significant. Most mid-size operators don't have the engineering capacity to do this credibly.
- Acquire before valuations rise. This is the option that closes fastest and carries the most long-term upside, but the window is narrowing. Strength tech startups are early-stage now. That changes quickly once category validation arrives, as it reliably does when institutional capital starts chasing the same thesis.
The boutique fitness M&A environment is already demonstrating how consolidation accelerates once a category gets competitive. Defensive moves in boutique fitness M&A signal that operators are increasingly aware of how quickly platform leverage can shift. Strength tech won't play out differently.
Meanwhile, European gym operators are watching consolidation reshape their own market. European gym consolidation is accelerating, and the brands that emerge from that process with scale will be the ones best positioned to negotiate technology partnerships from a position of strength rather than urgency.
What This Means for Your Members on the Floor
The technology conversation matters, but it ultimately has to connect to what members actually experience. Strength training is the fastest-growing modality in commercial fitness, and member expectations are rising alongside it. Someone who trains five days a week and follows a structured program, like a 12-week winter strength block, is not going to be satisfied indefinitely with a dumb rack and a whiteboard.
They want load recommendations that account for how they slept. They want form feedback without hiring a personal trainer for every session. They want their progress tracked automatically, not logged manually. These aren't aspirational features. They're table stakes for the next generation of gym members, and they're exactly what the new cohort of strength tech startups is building toward.
The member side of this equation matters for operators because it reframes what retention actually requires. Keeping a member who lifts four times a week isn't just about equipment quality or floor space anymore. It's about whether your facility offers a coaching experience that's meaningfully better than what they can replicate at home with a barbell, a mirror, and an app on their phone.
The Timeline Is Shorter Than It Looks
The cardio disruption took roughly six years to reshape purchasing behavior, brand positioning, and equipment valuations across a category. Strength tech is entering a market that already watched that happen. Investors, operators, and technology buyers are more pattern-aware than they were in 2012. That compresses timelines.
Suji, Kyla, and Fort are not Peloton yet. They don't have Peloton's distribution or capitalization, and strength training presents different UX challenges than a stationary bike with a screen. But the underlying market conditions, a massive global member base, underserved technology expectations, and demonstrated consumer willingness to pay for premium fitness software, are structurally similar.
Brands and operators that treat this as a "wait and see" moment are making the same calculation that traditional cardio OEMs made when connected hardware was still early. Some of them recovered. Most didn't, at least not in the margin profile they'd had before.
The strength tech category is being built right now. The companies doing the building are small, well-focused, and moving quickly. Your next strategic decision probably shouldn't be whether to engage with this shift. It should be how.