Perfectgym Is Coming For The Us Fitness Software Market

PerfectGym is making the case to U.S. fitness operators that the software they’re running is costing them more than they know

American gym operators are juggling an average of 10 software tools, and PerfectGym says seven of them shouldn’t exist.

The Poland-based fitness software platform, acquired by Germany-based Sport Alliance in 2024, is making its move into the U.S. market, and Konstantin Wolkowa, chief operating and product officer at Sport Alliance, isn’t sugarcoating what he thinks of the platforms many operators are stuck on.

“That’s not a stack,” said Wolkowa, who is leading the U.S. expansion. “That’s a workaround. We’re not here to add an eleventh tool. We’re here to replace seven.”

Since receiving a $100 million growth investment from PSG Equity in late 2023 — the firm’s second investment in Sport Alliance following an initial $65 million in 2021 — the company has moved aggressively to expand its global footprint. The 2024 deal made Sport Alliance the software provider for 14 of Europe’s top 30 fitness chains, with clients including FitX, RSG Group (owner of McFit and Gold’s Gym) and LifeFit Group, owner of Fitness First.

PerfectGym, for its part, processed $4.5 billion through its platform last year and completed more than 7,000 migrations globally.

The Hidden Tax

Wolkowa describes a foundational architecture problem many fitness operators are wrangling with, a problem he says most don’t realize they have until it’s already costing them.

“Operators are quietly paying a tax every day they stay on the wrong platform,” he said. “It doesn’t show up on an invoice. It shows up in workarounds. In the spreadsheet that exists because the system can’t produce the report. In the manual process at 7 a.m. Monday because the automation never quite worked. In the integration they couldn’t build because the API was gated.”

The compound cost of that decision is enormous, he said.

What Wolkowa wants U.S. operators to understand is that the decision goes deeper than which platform they land on. It’s about who controls their data once they get there and not because they’re planning to leave their current vendor, but because everything downstream depends on it.

Most platforms only talk about being open, Wolkowa added. 

“We treat data ownership as the default — full data warehouse access, open API, 13,304 integration activations running across operator accounts, with 6,292 of those activated last year alone,” he said. “Operators don’t need to know the tools they’ll want in 2028. They need to know their platform won’t be the reason they can’t use them.”

Wolkowa is equally outspoken about AI, calling it a credibility problem within the fitness industry.

“Read what the major vendors have published in the last 12 months,” he said. “The proof points are adoption: how many workouts are AI-generated, how many staff use the tool, how many agents are deployed. The proof points missing are the ones operators actually pay for: did churn move, did revenue lift, did the intervention cause the outcome — or would the member have renewed anyway.”

His answer is a default A/B testing structure built into the platform, in which 80% of the target group receives an intervention, while 20% does not. The lift over the control group surfaces in the operator’s dashboard as the headline view.

“We’re putting the proof — and the absence of proof — in front of the operator as the headline view,” he said. “That posture costs us claims we could otherwise make. It buys us claims we can defend.”

As Wolkowa sees it, AI is the wrong lens through which to view what PerfectGym is building. Instead, it’s operational intelligence and pattern recognition with the ability to act on what it sees at the right moment.

“The operator in Austin benefits from patterns the platform learned in Europe,” he explained. “Not because the markets are the same. Because operational complexity rhymes. And at the same time, it’s a platform to enable our customers to find a competitive advantage that otherwise would not exist.”

What’s ahead, Wolkowa added, is more of the same logic.

“Earlier signals on the members about to drift, triggers operators write themselves for the moments only they know, surfaces that meet the member where they already are — WhatsApp, SMS, the member app, voice. More receipts. Fewer announcements,” he said.

Ultimately, he said the point isn’t to make AI louder, but to make a fitness operator’s Tuesday morning quieter.

“We’ll know we got it right when nobody notices the AI — they just notice the outcomes,” he said.

Defining the Win

As for what PerfectGym’s U.S. footprint will look like in a few years, Wolkowa will first tell you what he doesn’t want.

“I don’t want a logo wall of trial accounts,” he said. “The U.S. has seen too many of those collapse 12 months later, and operators remember.”

Instead, he wants enterprise and serious mid-market U.S. operators running their full operation on the platform and willing to share their experience.

“What worked. What didn’t. What it took to get there,” he said. “Real customers willing to say on the record what changed. That’s the footprint that matters. The footprint I’m building toward is made of operators who stay because the platform works. Not because we engineered the lock — we never did. The door is wide open. That’s the point.”