Rachel Lea
Fishman

The Company She Is Running § 01

Arketa is a piece of business software that thousands of yoga studios, Pilates rooms, gyms, and - a detail Rachel Fishman likes to point out - cold plunges and cryotherapy centers use to sell classes, take payments, and hold their customers' phone numbers. It is the sort of company that on paper looks like a hundred other companies, until you notice that a striking share of the paperwork - the mobile app, the branded website, the class waitlist, the referral engine - was designed by someone who spent years on the wrong side of the check-in counter, watching each of these things fail in real time.

The mechanic is standard SaaS. A boutique studio owner signs up, throws away the three separate tools she used to schedule classes, take payments, and send text reminders, and replaces them with one login. Arketa handles memberships and drop-ins, ships a branded iOS app so the studio's regulars stop having to remember which vendor is which, and increasingly pipes AI into the customer-service layer so that at 11 p.m., when a member wants to move her Saturday class, no one has to be awake for it to happen.

The customer base is now over three thousand studios worldwide. The company is fifty-five people, headquartered in New York, and in June 2025 it raised a fifteen-million-dollar Series A led by Inspired Capital - the New York firm founded by Alexa von Tobel - bringing total funding to roughly twenty-three million. First Round Capital led the earlier round. Amity VC is on the cap table.

The Path There § 02

Fishman went to UCLA and studied political science and communications. This is worth mentioning only because it is not what you would guess if you were told that a person had ended up running a technology company that sells to Pilates studios. Somewhere during undergrad she hurt her knees, discovered yoga as rehab, discovered that she liked it enough to get a two-hundred-hour Power Yoga certification through Yoga Alliance, and then a CorePower certification on top of that. She started teaching.

Teaching yoga in California, in the mid-2010s, was the kind of job that also involved a lot of not-yoga: sitting at a desk before class, checking people in, refunding classes, printing sign-up sheets, telling a member for the third time that yes, her card on file had expired again. The tools studios ran on were, in Fishman's phrasing, tools they either loved or "loved to hate." Mostly the latter.

In 2020 she and Josh Archer, a UCLA classmate turned engineer, decided to build a better one. They incorporated Arketa. Weeks later the pandemic closed every in-person studio in the country, which is either the worst possible moment to launch a fitness-industry SaaS or, if you squint, the best. The team pivoted to virtual class delivery and on-demand video hosting inside of a quarter. When gyms reopened, the product had absorbed the hybrid case entirely.

Founder-Market Fit, Literalized § 03

There is a genre of tech-industry hagiography in which a founder claims to have deep customer empathy after having conducted forty user interviews. Fishman skipped that step by simply being the user for several years. This turns out to matter more than it sounds. The features that make Arketa recognizable to its customers - class waitlist automation, referral programs, the passive-income video library, the branded mobile app that hides the fact that it's Arketa underneath - are the sort of features you notice you need only after you have watched a first-time member abandon her booking flow because the tool made her create yet another account.

Fishman has been direct that this is also a female-founder story with a female-founder market. Roughly ninety-two percent of Arketa's customers are women, most of them running the sort of small businesses - a single studio, a network of instructors, a personal-training practice - that have historically been overlooked by generalist SaaS. "There are a lot of females helping studios," she has said, "but there's not another female CEO building in this space." Arketa's customer-support tone, its onboarding pace, and the way it sells (self-serve, low-lift, no aggressive contract) are shaped by that fact.

What the Series A Is For § 04

Fifteen million dollars is not enough money to invent a new industry. It is enough money to consolidate an existing one, which is roughly what the Arketa product roadmap now looks like. The team is investing in an AI concierge layer - the chatbots that answer "is there a 6 a.m. spin class Thursday?" and rebook a canceled class before the customer bothers a human - and continuing to expand the customer-support machinery for the studios themselves. Fishman has said publicly that businesses that fail to adopt these tools will fall behind, which is the sort of thing every CEO says, except in her case her customers agree loudly enough to sign contracts.

The competitive frame she uses is a chessboard. COVID, in her telling, "took the chessboard that was the fitness industry and totally flipped it on her head." What is interesting about that framing is who benefits from a flipped board: not the incumbents who had memorized the old positions, but the challenger who was still learning them. Arketa is now the challenger who learned the new game while the pieces were still in the air.

What Comes Next § 05

The most interesting question in this category is whether one company can become the operating system for a genuinely fragmented industry. Boutique fitness looks like a single market from a distance and, up close, dissolves into thousands of tiny businesses with different books, different clientele, different tolerances for change. Arketa's answer, so far, is that a well-designed white-label stack plus a founder who has folded actual towels in an actual studio is enough to close the gap. If it works, the resulting business is very large. If it doesn't, the failure will be interesting anyway, because it will tell you something about whether founder-market fit can, in fact, be industrialized.

Fishman is thirty. The company is five. There is a lot of runway left in that math.