Yoga | Mind, Body & Scheduling: An Online Tool For Yoga Studios
on August 21st, 2010 at 12:22 amYoga may be an ancient practice built on centuries of tradition, but some modern-day yoga studios and fitness clubs are using a 21st century online service to improve customer experiences and increase their bottom lines.
MindBody Inc., doing business as MindBody Online , said today it raised $11 million in its second round of venture funding to back a Web-based scheduling and management service for a variety of health clubs, spas and salons.
Founded in 2001, the company started off focusing on yoga and pilates studios but has expanded to a range of health-oriented small businesses that can benefit from online scheduling. The company’s core service enables people to sign up for and pay for classes online and enables businesses to manage monthly subscriptions and class packages of, for example, 10 classes. The service also includes e-commerce services for studios to sell products online and in-store.
MindBody Online now has 9,500 businesses using the services and tracking 1.2 million consumers.
The company shifted from a licensed software model to a software as a service model in 2005 and since then has taken off, said Rick Stollmeyer, founder and chief executive of MindBody. It’s chugging along at a $12.5 million revenue run rate, expecting to close the year at $13 million in revenue, up from $8 million last year and $6 million the year before. The company has been profitable since last year but is investing its capital for growth this year.
“We were basically putting that capital to work accelerating growth (last year),” Stollmeyer said. “We’ll go into a controlled burn in 2011 and return to profitability at the end of next year at a much higher run rate.”
While perhaps not the first place one thinks of for online innovation, the yoga studios the company is targeting are part of the trend of smaller companies increasingly accessing powerful software tools through the Web, said Jeremy Levine, partner at Bessemer
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