1club Raises €2.2M to Build the Future of Sports Software

Today, we're excited to announce that 1club has raised €2.2 million in seed funding to keep building the next generation of software for sports and activity businesses. The round was backed by LAUNCHub Ventures and BrightCap Ventures.

When we started 1club, we had a simple belief:

Sports deserve better software.

The industry is enormous, diverse, and deeply important to people's lives. Yet much of the technology behind it is still fragmented, outdated, manual, and harder to use than it should be. Most of it was built by sports enthusiasts, not by teams who build software for a living.

Owners spend too much time on admin and not enough with their members. Booking an activity is harder than it should be. Payments, memberships, schedules, communication, marketing, websites, and member data often live in disconnected systems.

Many club, gym, and studio owners have become dependent on marketplaces, aggregators, and booking apps. These platforms share little or no member data and treat each business as an interchangeable facility, leaving owners reliant on someone else's platform to reach their own members.

And even as more people want to be healthier and more active, technology often adds friction instead of removing it.

We started 1club to change that.

No longer choosing between sports and technology

After more than a decade building OfficeRnD, I planned to take a proper break from startups.

That lasted a week or two.

I've always had two big passions: building technology and playing sports.

Growing up, it felt like I had to pick one. Engineering or sport. Writing software, or spending my time on tennis courts, climbing walls, football pitches, and in sports clubs.

With 1club, I no longer had to choose.

This time, we could take everything we'd learned building global SaaS products and apply it to an industry we love.

But we didn't want to build just another management system.

AI is fundamentally changing what software can be. Instead of adding more dashboards, settings, and workflows for people to manage, software can now understand what someone wants to achieve and help make it happen.

That's the opportunity behind 1club, and it's why we built it AI-native from day one.

From an idea to clubs around the world

When we started, we knew the problems existed.

What we didn't know was how universal they were.

Today, 1club is used by businesses in more than 40 countries across four continents.

Even more exciting is how varied those businesses are.

We work with clubs, gyms, and studios across more than 10 sports and activities, including tennis, padel, climbing, karate, jiu-jitsu, Pilates, yoga, stretching, fitness, and a growing number of kids' sports academies.

On the surface, they can look very different.

A padel club, a Pilates studio, and a martial arts academy may run on very different schedules. But they all depend on the same foundations: memberships, bookings, payments, and strong relationships with their members and, often, their families.

And the problems they face are remarkably similar.

They want to spend less time on admin.

They want to give their members a great experience.

They want to attract new members and keep the ones they already have.

And they want technology that helps them grow, not technology that gives them more work.

That reinforced one of our most important convictions:

We shouldn't be building software for one sport. We should be building a platform for the entire sports industry.

Building the operating system for modern sports businesses

Our first priority is the people who run clubs, gyms, and studios.

We believe the best way to transform how people discover and experience sports is to first give the businesses behind those experiences dramatically better technology.

1club brings together everything a modern sports business needs to Run and Grow:

Memberships. Scheduling. Payments & Billing. Reporting. Websites. Marketing automation. Review management. Member engagement.

Instead of stitching together five or ten different products, we want clubs to have one connected platform running underneath their entire business.

And we want AI to work across that entire platform. Not as another button or chatbot, but as part of how the system works.

The software should answer questions, automate repetitive work, spot opportunities, communicate with members, improve pricing, create content, understand the business, and, eventually, take action on the owner's behalf.

The goal is simple:

Give club, gym, and studio owners leverage.

Let the software handle the busywork, so people can spend more time on what technology can't replace: coaching, building communities, creating great experiences, and helping people become more active.

The bigger vision

Helping owners run and grow their businesses is where we start. It's not where the story ends.

Our long-term vision for 1club is much bigger.

We want to build a world where being active fits naturally into everyday life.

A world where you can say:

"I have an hour free after work. Find me a tennis session nearby."

Or:

"My daughter wants to try climbing this weekend."

Or simply:

"Help me become more active."

And technology understands what you mean, finds the right place, works around your schedule, makes the booking, handles the payment, and gets you there.

Behind that experience is a network of great clubs, gyms, studios, academies, instructors, and sports facilities, all running on modern infrastructure. It's already taking shape with the 1club Sports Network, where people can discover clubs and book activities near them.

That's why we see 1club as more than sports club management software.

We're building the technology that connects sports businesses, people, and eventually companies into one seamless sports ecosystem.

Why raise now?

The past months have given us something far more valuable than our original assumptions: real customers using 1club every day.

They've shown us where we're right, where we're wrong, and how much more there is to build.

This €2.2M investment lets us move faster.

We'll invest heavily in product and AI, grow the team, raise the bar on service, keep improving the experience for clubs and their members, and accelerate our international expansion.

But raising capital isn't the milestone that matters most.

The real milestone is a tennis club, a climbing gym, a jiu-jitsu academy, or a Pilates studio on the other side of the world trusting something our team built to run an important part of their business.

That's what keeps us going.

We're just getting started

There's something special about this stage of a company.

We can talk to a customer in the morning, build something in the afternoon, and watch them use it soon after.

We can question assumptions.

We can move fast.

And we can build from first principles, at the exact moment AI is redefining what software can be.

We're grateful to everyone who has trusted us this early: our customers, our team, our partners, and our investors.

€2.2M gives us more fuel, but the mission stays the same: make sports easier to run, easier to discover, and easier to make part of everyday life.

We have a lot to build.

And we're only getting started.

Run a club, gym, or studio? Start with 1club's free plan, no credit card needed. Start free →

Miro Miroslavov
Co-founder & CEO, 1club