Arketa runs the business of wellness.

Rachel Lea Fishman came to yoga to fix her knees. She stayed to fix the software. Working as a certified instructor, she watched boutique studios - the small yoga rooms, pilates reformers and spin lofts that anchor neighborhood wellness - struggle with tools built for a different era. Scheduling lived in one app, payments in another, video somewhere else, and marketing usually nowhere at all. In 2020, with UCLA peer Josh Archer, an engineer and Ironman World Championship finisher, she founded Arketa to pull all of it into one place.

Arketa calls itself an operating system for the wellness industry, and the phrase is doing real work. Rather than sell a single feature, the platform bundles the jobs a studio actually has: booking classes and appointments, taking payments, running memberships and loyalty programs, hosting and selling on-demand video, launching courses and retreats, publishing a branded website and mobile app, and automating email and SMS marketing - all from one dashboard.

What Arketa actually does

For a studio owner, the pitch is subtraction. Instead of stitching together five subscriptions, they run the business inside Arketa: clients book on a branded site or app, payments clear through Stripe, waivers sign themselves, and the calendar handles in-studio, online and hybrid classes at once. When a member hits their 100th class, the system can celebrate it automatically. When someone abandons a booking, marketing automations follow up.

The payoff shows up as time. Teresa at College Park Yoga reported cutting IT management from roughly ten hours a week to thirty minutes a month after moving to Arketa. That is the quiet promise of good small-business software - it hands back the hours owners would rather spend teaching.

Who it serves

Arketa's customers are boutique fitness and wellness businesses: yoga and pilates studios, spin and strength gyms, recovery and wellness centers, and solo instructors scaling toward multiple locations. Thousands of them run on the platform, and a striking share - about 92% - are women-led. That is not a coincidence so much as a design choice. The company has been explicit about prioritizing diversity across gender, race and sexual orientation in both hiring and investment, and it built for a segment larger platforms tended to overlook.

The problem it solves

Boutique fitness is booming - analysts project the market toward $80 billion by 2029 - but most of that money flows through small operators with no technology team. The gap Arketa targets is operational leverage: giving a solo instructor or a two-location studio the same back-office power a national chain enjoys, without the national chain's budget. Booking, payments, retention and content, unified, so owners can grow revenue beyond the drop-in class.

How it differs

The incumbent question comes up fast. Fitness software is a crowded field led for years by Mindbody, alongside WellnessLiving, Momence, Walla and others. Fishman's answer has become something of a company motto: "Yeah, there's a million and one people in this space. But there were a million and one people doing ride-sharing before Uber." Arketa's wager is that being wellness-native matters - a lighter, modern platform designed around small studios and their multiple revenue streams, rather than a legacy system adapted to them. Its 2025 launch of Arketa AI, an assistant built specifically for fitness studios, pushes that further: handling routine customer-service questions so staff can stay on the floor.

The business, and the backing

Arketa runs a B2B SaaS model layered with integrated payments - studios subscribe to the platform and Arketa participates in the transactions flowing through it. That alignment is visible in the numbers: the company reports processing nearly $500 million in transactions. Investors have noticed. After a $7.6 million raise led by First Round Capital, Arketa closed a $15 million Series A in June 2025 led by Inspired Capital, with First Round, Y Combinator and Amity returning. Inspired's Chris Brown framed the thesis bluntly: "Platforms like Arketa will become the distribution mechanism through which AI reaches global SMBs."

Where it fits in the market is, then, a specific bet: not the biggest gym chains, not the generic scheduler, but the operating layer for the long tail of independent wellness businesses - the studios where most of the industry's growth, and most of its owners, actually live.