Ventech China's investment portfolio SuperMonkey has completed a Series E round of financing led by CICC's fund, valued at nearly $1 billion. Back in 2017, Ventech China led a Series A+ round of financing for SuperMonkey.

Ventech China believes that in the purpose of ‘providing users with a professional fitness experience with warm and professional companionship’, SuperMonkey will become China's leading healthy lifestyle community that serves billions of users.

As a new gym domestic brand, SuperMonkey takes group classes as the core and provides users with fitness experience service in the pay-per-use mode. Until now, SuperMonkey has opened and prepared to open almost 200 stores in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Hangzhou as well as other first-tier cities and new first-tier cities.

Tiao Tiao, the founder of SuperMonkey, said she believed in China, there would be an opportunity for a gym chain brand to open more than 10,000 chain stores. SuperMonkey plans to upgrade its management ability to the next level within the next three years, including organization, training and course ability.

Even though the number of stores is not the largest, SuperMonkey’s has valuation of nearly $1 billion after this round of financing, which is one of the top among offline chain gym brands in China.

After this round of financing, SuperMonkey will continue to focus on improving the management ability of "the next level of stores" to support the growth of the company to thousands of stores. 

Growth across thousands of stores: Continued optimism for offline fitness

The Covid-19 epidemic has boosted investment in home fitness and fitness consumer products, but companies and investors remain optimistic about the development of offline fitness.

Tiao Tiao, founder of SuperMonkey, said that as in the hotel and catering sectors, industry standards are set by leading brands, and China's fitness chains are still small.

"Compared with the chain scale of Planet Fitness's 3500 stores in the United States, China has the opportunity to have more than 10,000 chain gym brands",according to China's digital and mobile Internet capabilities.

Therefore, compared with the epidemic capital heavy bet on family fitness, SuperMonkey believes that "family fitness for SuperMonkey is an extension of the existing users, is still a complementary product". Each brand has its own dedicated market, and the company is far from reaching its own ceiling in the offline gym. Thus, instead of looking for a diverse fitness market, SuperMonkey has in the past two years focused on the upgrading of its organizational management model and back-end supply chain, such as coaches and courses.

Coaching is the core competency 

SuperMonkey in the past two years, more attention to the coaching side of the supply and promotion. According to Tiaotiao's statement: the size of the excellent coaching team is an important factor restricting the growth of the company's stores.

As a result, in addition to continuing to recruit more coaches, SuperMonkey has put more emphasis on self-training. Including the recruitment and training of the SuperMonkey zero - basis coach, as well as the research and development of the course and training.

At present, the number of SuperMonkey coaches is 1000, which is relatively large in the scale of full-time group class coaches in gyms around the world. In the future, about 500 new coaches will be needed for the new 100 stores, 90% of which will be self-trained, and all of these need strong back-end supply chain support.

In the research and development of self-research course, SuperMonkey carries out "brand system", each self-research course manager is the founder of the original course. SuperMonkey users provide a natural soil for the launch of self-research courses. The launch of self-research courses is a process of "high frequency connection with users based on user needs and following the trend".

At present, the company's self-research courses and copyrighted courses account for half of each other. Self-research courses have witnessed a rapid growth in the past two years.

Tiaotiao believes that the outbreak of the self-study course is a natural process. "At present, most of the domestic copyright courses come from Europe and the United States, and the needs of Chinese users have not been better met." More self-study courses are expected in the future.

According to the statement of the company, the quality of the coach is the lifeline that restricts the company's growth. Of course, this is also almost the core proposition of the Chinese fitness industry. The upgrading of China's fitness industry, in essence, needs the synchronous upgrading of the fitness industry management and the quality of coaches.

The future of the SuperMonkey

In the epidemic year of 2020, SuperMonkey will conduct SuperMonkey Go online live course and launch SuperMonkey App. However, according to the company's current practice, offline is still the core of the company at present.

In SuperMonkey’s view, the fitness needs of Chinese users are "professional companionship with temperature", which all require coaches and offline experience.

Tiaotiao: The future of SuperMonkey: work together online and offline to build a healthy lifestyle community serving hundreds of millions of users.