Tomorrow Health

Natalia Karbasova

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Entrepreneurship

Where health goes next. Natalia Karbasova talks to the CEOs, founders, and investors building the future of health, fitness, and wellness technology. From gym floors to boardrooms, from wearables to longevity - the conversations that shape a $7 trillion industry.

2d ago

Smart Fit: The Visa of fitness

One in 75 Latin Americans passes through Smart Fit's platform. Founder Edgard Corona on why he built his own aggregator. Every large gym chain watched corporate benefit platforms take a share of their members and negotiated over the terms. Edgard Corona built his own instead, lost money on it for years, and now holds more than a third of that market in Brazil. He founded Smart Fit in 1996 and built it into the largest fitness operator in Latin America, more than 2,000 clubs across 16 countries, and moved to chairman in March when his son took over as chief executive. The season was brought to you by Zing Coach. In this conversation: Why the cost of money in Latin America, not strategy, decides how many clubs he ownsWhat a low-cost operator has to change before it can open in MoroccoWhy a gym group is buying its own NVIDIA hardware instead of renting computeWhat he thinks every large chain got wrong about aggregators, and what it cost themWhere the model behind all of this actually came from, and it is not fitnessWhat has to be true before a gym chain can call itself a health company Chapters: 00:00 One in 75 Latin Americans is on the platform 00:27 Who he is and what he is building 01:23 What Smart Fit actually is, and where it goes next 02:38 Why he owns eight in ten clubs instead of franchising 03:24 What travels into a new market and what does not 04:15 Where new concepts get tested before they reach a budget club 04:59 The part of the experience nobody is building yet 05:21 Why a gym chain built its own aggregator 07:09 What it takes to put a rival gym on your platform 08:19 Build or buy, and the cost of capital behind it 09:35 The mistake he thinks the industry made 10:11 The members who had never trained anywhere 11:13 What stops a gym chain becoming a health company 11:52 What he took from Life Time, and the wearable plan 13:55 From fingerprints to face recognition at the door 14:37 Ten years out 15:03 One decision Links: Edgard Corona on LinkedIn Natalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow Health websiteApply to join FitTech Club Zing Coach
4d ago

Zing Coach: The trainer you can't hire (Season 2 opening)

Season 2 opener, brought to you by Zing Coach. Only 22 percent of people ever try a personal trainer, says Zing Coach CEO Anton Marchanka. Personal training is the most effective retention tool a club has, and almost nobody buys it. Anton Marchanka puts the lifetime trial rate at around 22 percent, and says the reason is structural: there are not enough trainers to meet the demand, and the ones who exist cost more than the membership. He runs Zing Coach, which built a consumer AI coaching app and now licenses the model into clubs including New York Sports Clubs, and he ran Daily Burn before that, so he has operated both sides of that line. In this conversation: Why he charges operators per active member rather than per location, and why the price per member falls as usage risesWhat Zing Coach had to unlearn from the consumer business before the first club deployment workedWhy high-value-low-price clubs and boutiques buy the same product for opposite reasonsWho the product does not work for, in his own wordsWhat integration actually costs an operator, in a number he gives on the record Chapters: 00:00 The 22 percent who ever try a personal trainer 00:52 Why Daily Burn pushed him off the mobile-only path 02:43 What 850,000 paying users showed about retention 03:50 Not enough trainers, and too expensive 05:18 What selling into gyms forced him to unlearn 06:59 Who this does not work for 07:18 Charging per active member, not per location 09:03 Why budget clubs and boutiques buy this for opposite reasons 12:04 The consumer app as a testing ground 13:02 Strength training, AI adoption and community 15:27 What integration actually costs 15:58 What operators get wrong on day one 18:08 The gym floor as a guided experience Links: Anton Marchanka on LinkedInNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow Health websiteApply to join FitTech Club
Aug 27

Haelsi: The patient is not the buyer

A prescribed health app in Germany sells for 200 euros. Adham Kassab, COO of haelsi, on where 120 of it goes. Germany lets public health insurers pay for a prescribed app. That sounds like the easiest distribution deal in consumer health until you price the entry: an information security certification, an audit, a randomised controlled trial, ongoing reporting, and a further charge every time you change the product. And once you are listed, the person using the app is not the person paying for it. Adham Kassab ran Selfapy, one of Germany's best known prescribed digital therapy companies for mental health, through its sale to MEDICE. He is now Chief Operations Officer at haelsi in Vienna, a network of health centres that sells corporate memberships, rents capacity to doctors and builds its own digital services on top. He has run the software side and the physical side of the same market. In this conversation: - Why prescribed health apps in Germany cluster around the same price, and what is actually left per order - Why "customer" is the wrong word in healthcare, and which of the three stakeholders blocks the deal - Why most digital health products have not reached profitable unit economics - Why doctors stopped being persuaded by downloads, retention and engagement - What the fitness industry has to prove before an insurer will pay for strength training, and the one step a gym operator can take this week Recorded in early 2026. Chapters: 00:00 Three people in a restaurant: who is the customer 00:12 Unit economics and how fitness gets paid, in brief 01:26 What Selfapy is, in plain terms 03:12 Three tiers of health app, and only one gets reimbursed 04:40 One orders, one eats, one pays, and what listing costs 06:10 200 euros per prescription, 80 euros of margin 07:18 haelsi: centres, corporate memberships and doctor rentals 09:39 GLP-1, muscle loss and why there are no fitness partners 11:05 Why doctors do not prescribe strength training 11:31 What fitness has to prove, and one step to take this week 14:29 What a clinic chain and a therapy app share 15:40 Outcome-based reimbursement changes the top metric 16:53 Big tech in health: more potential, not more effectiveness 17:26 Consumerization is not reversible 18:15 Pulse check: seven questions, seven answers Links: Adham Kassab on LinkedInHaelsiNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow HealthApply to join FitTech Club
Aug 27

LifeTime: The longevity gold rush

Life Time has 17.2 million square feet under roof and 1.5 million members. Jeff Zwiefel on converting both into a longevity business. Recorded in 2025. Most operators talk about adding a medical offer. Life Time built one inside the clubs it already owns, and Jeff Zwiefel puts numbers on it: what a single location produces, what margin it carries, and how much of an existing membership base he expects to convert. Zwiefel was president and chief operating officer of Life Time, which he joined when it had seven clubs in Minnesota and left at 180. In his final years there he was building MIORA Longevity and Performance, the company's longevity business, and separately a new vertical, Life Time Health. In this conversation: - Why Life Time treats longevity as a conversion problem rather than an acquisition problem - What one longevity location produces per month, and the margin band he underwrites - The share of an existing membership base he expects to buy, and why he thinks it is not higher - Why the hardest of his three build problems was hiring practitioners, not clinical design - The research that changed his mind on GLP-1s, and what he thinks the category is worth to health clubs Chapters: 00:00 Cold open 00:29 Introduction 01:39 Seven clubs to a lifestyle company 03:15 The two projects he is scaling 05:31 The longevity gold rush 06:32 Inside the metabolic code 08:28 Hub and spoke, not club by club 09:37 What one location can produce 11:15 How much of the base converts 11:56 Three things that nearly broke it 13:23 Whether this travels outside the US 14:48 Clinic KPIs against club KPIs 16:18 GLP-1s and the health club industry 18:42 Where the next growth comes from 20:15 What he is watching next Links: Jeff Zwiefel on LinkedInLife TimeNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow HealthApply to join FitTech Club
Aug 27

Hyrox: What gyms forgot to sell

150 events in the 150 biggest cities, and HYROX is at 85. Co-founder Christian Toetzke on why a race fills gyms instead of emptying them. Recorded in 2025. The fitness industry built itself on burning calories and aesthetics. Christian Toetzke's argument is that no other sport in the world runs on that motivation, and that this is the reason the average gym membership does not survive the spring. His alternative is a dated external goal that a member trains toward, which changes both how long they stay and what they will pay for. Toetzke co-founded HYROX in Hamburg in 2017 with Moritz Fürste. It runs a standardised indoor fitness race, the same format in every city it enters, and licenses the training programme behind it to affiliated gyms through HYROX 365 for a monthly fee. Before HYROX he built and sold a mass-participation cycling event business, so he has taken the same thesis into two categories. In this conversation: - Why HYROX is the only mass-participation format that sends people into gyms rather than out of them - What a gym has to package and sell before the affiliate licence pays for itself - Why Toetzke will never open a HYROX gym, and what that decision protects - What the gym industry gets wrong about the motivation it has been selling for forty years - Why he thinks the profitable gym of the next decade owns less equipment, not more Chapters: 00:00 Why an athlete spends differently 00:28 Christian Toetzke and the HYROX model 01:23 The three markets still missing 02:39 Why the product is deliberately offline 04:08 How a gym becomes an affiliate 04:40 The only race that sends people into the gym 08:35 The motivation the gym industry never sold 10:44 From elite to everyone 11:50 Which gyms the format actually fits 12:29 Why HYROX will never open its own gyms 14:00 Electronic targets and machine judging 16:09 The gym as the place your week is built around 18:12 Why the profitable gym owns less equipment Links: Christian Toetzke on LinkedInHyroxNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow HealthApply to join FitTech Club
Aug 27

Sweatcoin: The pay-to-move economy

Sweatcoin pays people to walk. Co-founder Oleg Fomenko on where the money comes from when your product pays the customer. Recorded in January 2026. Every fitness business charges for activity. Membership, trainer, kit. Oleg Fomenko built the reverse, and he tells Natalia Karbasova that early investors called it a charity and asked where the business was. Fomenko is co-founder of Sweatcoin and now leads Sweat Foundation, the business behind the Sweat token and Sweat Wallet. He spent most of a decade on Sweatcoin before moving across, and the two companies exist separately for reasons he explains in the episode. In this conversation: - Where the revenue sits when the product pays the customer instead of charging them - What a brand is actually buying when it pays to be a partner - Why these users are the mirror image of Strava's, and who they are - Why a failed Bitcoin fork produced two separate companies - What it takes to put a cash number on an active day Links: Oleg Fomenko on LinkedInSweatcoinNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow HealthApply to join FitTech Club Chapters: 00:00 Why movement should be a trillion-dollar market 00:29 Sweatcoin, and why it pays you to walk 01:40 From 100 million to 200 million 02:54 How it actually works 05:06 Cashing out, and what a token is worth 06:20 Why these are not Strava users 09:45 Where the money comes from 10:56 What a partner is paying for 13:01 Why there are two companies 14:45 The premium subscription 15:50 Putting a price on an active day 19:11 What operators can do with this 20:53 What the industry gets wrong 21:39 Where to find Tomorrow Health All figures in this episode are Oleg Fomenko's own disclosures at the time of recording.
Aug 27

EGYM: The unstaffed gym problem

Recorded one day before EGYM announced its merger. Co-founder and CTO Florian Sauter on why the AI is not a language model. Recorded in January 2026. Every fitness technology conversation in 2026 starts with large language models. Florian Sauter runs the technology at EGYM and says that is not what the company builds with. On his account the core product sits on classical machine learning over structured data, and the hard input is not workout data at all. It is hard assessment data from equipment. Sauter is co-founder and chief technology officer at EGYM, the Munich connected-equipment and gym software business. He has held the role for around fifteen years, from a single room to a company that on 31 March 2026 completed a merger with Playlist, the parent of Mindbody, ClassPass and Booker, in a deal the companies put at 7.5 billion dollars enterprise value with 785 million dollars of new equity. This conversation was recorded on 14 January 2026, the day before that merger was announced. In this conversation: - Why EGYM Genius runs on classical machine learning rather than large language models - Why assessment data, not workout data, is the input that closes the loop - What member care looks like in a gym segment that carries no staff - Why a training plan has no single outcome to optimise for - What combining hardware and software actually buys a product team Links: Florian Sauter on LinkedInEGYMNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow HealthApply to join FitTech Club Chapters: 00:00 The gyms with nobody on the floor 00:25 Three things to listen for, and what happened the next day 01:37 Fifteen years, from a single room 02:49 EGYM Genius and the average member 03:55 Why assessment data is the hard part 05:04 Less generative AI, more machine learning 06:54 The Fitness Hub and computer vision 07:33 A training plan has no single right answer 08:53 Everything in house 09:11 Member care with no staff on the floor 10:24 Copilots, and mixed results 11:15 What hardware plus software actually buys you 12:09 Fitness converging with health 13:41 The problem AI will never solve 14:06 Build value, technology follows
Aug 27

SATS: The eight-week window that decides retention

Almost 300 clubs and 700,000 members. SATS Chief Digital Officer Gaute Sandal on what actually keeps a member coming back. Recorded in 2025. Every fitness operator is told it needs an ecosystem. At the time of this conversation SATS, the largest operator in the Nordics, connected to no wearables and no external apps at all. Gaute Sandal had looked at it repeatedly and put it below the line every time. His argument is not that integration is worthless. It is that it does not move the only number that matters, which is whether a member who is struggling builds a habit. Sandal is Chief Digital Officer at SATS, running a team of more than 50 people across the app, machine learning and in-club systems. SATS operates close to 300 clubs across the Nordic countries, has more than 700,000 members and employs close to 10,000 people. He is the person who decides what gets built and what gets cut. In this conversation: - Why the first eight weeks decide whether a membership survives - Why more members open the SATS app than walk into a club, and what that makes the app - Why wearable integration kept losing the priority argument inside SATS - What happened to the Mentra home-training bet when the clubs reopened - What SATS tracks in the club, and what it refuses to connect to a member Links: Gaute Sandal on LinkedInSATSNatalia Karbasova on LinkedInTomorrow HealthApply to join FitTech Club Chapters: 00:00 What happens when you stop showing up 00:30 Three things to listen for, and what changed since 02:00 What success looks like for a chief digital officer 03:46 Retention as a commitment on both sides 05:11 Mid-market, full service, and the group training bet 05:28 Inside the first eight weeks 07:17 Clubs and app as one ecosystem 07:48 More members open the app than enter a club 08:36 What happened to the Mentra home-training bet 10:16 Why integration keeps losing the priority argument 12:07 What the ideal integration would actually do 13:34 What SATS tracks in the club, and what it refuses to connect 16:21 What a wearable or equipment partner has to bring 17:45 The ecosystems he rates 18:56 The intervention problem worth solving

8 Episodes

Where health goes next. Natalia Karbasova talks to the CEOs, founders, and investors building the future of health, fitness, and wellness technology. From gym floors to boardrooms, from wearables to longevity - the conversations that shape a $7 trillion industry.

Creator

Natalia Karbasova
Years Active

2026
Episodes

8
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2026 Natalia Karbasova
Show Website

Tomorrow Health