In episode four of our pilot season weekly video series Global Startup Report, we were thrilled to be joined live by FightCamp Founder & CEO Khalil Zahar, a Montreal Founder Institute portfolio alum.
FightCamp leads the connected fitness category for boxing and martial arts sports, and announced the close of their $50M Series B in June of 2021, led by New Enterprise Associates and with participation from impressive household-name industry titans joining the round as investors, including Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, Georges St-Pierre, and UFC heavyweight champ Francis Ngannou.
Watch Global Startup Report host Martín Martinez's full interview with FightCamp CEO Khalil Zahar, or read on to learn more below:
FightCamp offers an entire at-home fitness boxing gym platform experience—but its core tech lies in its punch trackers, which are thumb-size wearable devices that fit right into the users' boxing wrist wraps (worn inside the gloves), and work to actively measure the type and speed of each individual punch thrown throughout the workout. Supporting data analytic help users to track their progress over time, compete with others on virtual gym leaderboards, set and track personal goals, and much more.
FightCamp also has a mobile app, where users can stream hundreds of free workouts led by USA boxing certified coaches and NASM certified personal trainers. While the FightCamp app also offers shadowboxing, core and body weight exercises that do NOT require a punching bag, the ultimate FightCamp workout experience utilizes the punch trackers in combination with a heavy bag (you can use your own bag, or one purchased from FightCamp) to follow along live with the virtual instructors throughout your boxing workout. Today, FightCamp boasts more than 30,000 paying home subscribers, with multiple users / home.
Origins of FightCamp: from Startup Garages to Olympic Gyms
Originally from Tunisia and raised in Quebec City, FightCamp CEO Khalil Zahar had studied mechanical engineering and mechatronics, and worked on medical devices that exposed him to the state of the art in MEMs (microelectromechanical) and the dawn of miniature sensors becoming incorporated into everyday devices of all kinds.
Zahar joined a boxing gym for the first time when he moved to Toronto at age 20—he immediately loved the sport, but after a year of progressing rapidly through the steep learning curve, he felt his progress was less tangible in year 2. As a mechanical engineer, this led him to wanting to measure his output quantitatively—he learned from his boxing coach, who had connections to the Canadian Olympic boxing team, that the state-of-the-art 'data' at the time for the sport was simply counting punches with a manual clicker.
This fact, that even the most sophisticated 2014-era Olympic-level athletes were still counting their punches with a clicker, amazed Zahar as an engineer—he was sure that level of punch tracking could be completely automated with a small wearable, and that many more data points could also be measured by such a device, besides just the raw number of punches. That led to the V1 birth of FightCamp, at the time under the brand name Hykso.
Smartphones could do that stuff—it was becoming more prevalent that you can connect trackers to bluetooth, and could build an app and actually get that data in real time—which was very empowering for the athletes. So that's that became the focal point of Hykso.
For the first 2 years until 2016, the FightCamp team worked exclusively to service the pro-level market with athletes from Olympic Canadian and US teams and other pro-level fighters. The team graduated at this time from the Founder Institute Montreal Spring 2015 pre-seed accelerator cohort; then in 2016, the team joined YCombinator and relocated the company to California.
Around 2017, the FightCamp team began to see some new market opportunities emerging—fitness classes, especially fitness boxing, were among the fastest-growing fitness concepts in the US—and the pro-level coaches and trainers who were using their punch trackers with their top athletes, began to ask about using it also with their clients in their gyms at the more amateur and intermediate levels. At the same time, Peloton was beginning its rise, and the whole concept of at-home fitness was becoming increasingly popularized with new models built around IoT connected-fitness devices.
Rebranding to FightCamp officially in 2018, the company added new elements of connected-fitness classes and accessories (like punching bags and training mats) onto their MVP (pro-level athlete) punch trackers, thereby breaking into a growing market segment where cycling sports had a clear leader, but no one was yet doing anything similar for martial arts sports—FightCamp stepped into that opportunity, and has stayed atop the leaderboard ever since.
Now based in the Los Angeles area, FightCamp CEO Khalil Zahar emphasize how empowering boxing fitness is as an exercise form, noting that two-thirds of their customers are new to boxing, with FightCamp being their entry point into martial arts sports, and that 55% of their users are women.
It is a very empowering workout exercise, it is a very empowering way of getting fit—and the reason why is because you're learning a very useful skill as you're actually getting fitter, and that stays with you regardless of your conditioning level.
In closing up the interview, Khalil Zahar's parting advice to early-stage entrepreneurs is to get out into the world and share your startup idea with as many prospective customers in your target market as possible, never to be afraid that someone will steal your idea (this doesn't happen), and always making sure you're building in order to solve for a real pain point.
To learn more about FightCamp or signup to get started, visit JoinFightCamp.com
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