If you’re anything like yours truly, your fitness ambitions for 2026 far exceed reality.
Venture investors, luckily, seem to be more upbeat than they have been in years about the future of fitness and wellness. Startup investment in those categories totaled more than $3.6 billion in the first half of this year, putting 2026 on pace to come in about a third higher than 2025, though notably last year marked the lowest sum for wellness-related startup funding in at least six years.
The recent uptick also puts investment into fitness- and wellness-related startups on pace to top each year since 2022, though deals are concentrating into fewer, larger bets.
Largest fundraisers of H1 2026
This year’s funding totals have been driven by a handful of outsized deals, like wearable health tracker Whoop’s $575 million Series G in March.
Other companies that have raised large rounds this year include senior healthcare provider Devoted Health, which raised a $366 million Series F at the beginning of the year, and Solace, which raised a $130 million Series C from investors including IVP in February. Its platform connects patients with professional healthcare advocates who support them through complex medical journeys like cancer, rare-disease management and substance abuse treatment.
Those fundings are markedly different from the hardware plays that received investor attention during the pandemic. For example, connected fitness devices startups Tonal and Hydrow each raised hundreds of millions of dollars during the peak funding years, but haven’t received new investment in three-plus years.
AI gives devices a second act
That doesn’t mean investors have entirely given up on hardware. Rather, the more compelling pitch in 2026 appears to be a device that continuously collects health data and uses AI to turn it into personalized guidance to improve overall wellness and fitness.
Along with Whoop’s Series G, New York-based sleep technology company Eight Sleep raised a $50 million Series D in March, while India-based metabolic health wearable maker Ultrahuman secured the equivalent of about $44 million in Series C funding in February.
A few entrants are also drawing substantial checks. New Delhi-based Temple raised a sizable $54 million seed round in February for a wearable focused on brain-centered health and performance metrics. The company says its technology tracks cerebral blood flow and uses a proprietary measure called Entropy to quantify users’ real-time energy expenditure.
The future of fitness funding and exits
We expect to see continued investor interest in companies that bring AI to bear on wellness-related offerings, including in more specialized areas such as longevity, mental health, sleep and athletic performance.
We may also see more funding for devices that serve as data-collection layers for AI-driven health platforms. At the same time, we don’t expect investors to broadly return to large, pricey home-gym gadgets or hardware that doesn’t have a strong recurring software, data or healthcare component.
We could also see more exits in the sector as companies combine their capabilities through M&A deals or private equity roll-ups. And, we would not be surprised to see more established players make strategic buys of smaller companies, as we saw last year with fitness tracking platform Strava’s acquisition of running workout planner Runna, or more recently with Garmin’s purchase of endurance-training platform TrainingPeaks.
Still, we don’t foresee a flurry of IPOs from the sector, perhaps with the exception of a few star players. Crunchbase’s predictive intelligence tools suggest likely IPO candidates in the fitness and wellness categories include Whoop, rival wearable wellness tracker Oura, mental health platform Spring Health, and Fountain Life, which operates a network of clinics offering what it bills as AI-driven longevity and preventative health services.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
