About GymSetora

I didn’t take the usual path into software. I didn’t attend a top tech institute, and I didn’t write my first line of code as a child.

As a teenager in Kolkata, I put everything into Chartered Accountancy. I skipped college to prepare full-time and cleared the CA Foundation. But I knew corporate finance wasn’t my calling. Building was.

So I stepped off the conventional track. In 2025 I enrolled in university and, alongside my classes, bootstrapped a B2B agricultural retail venture. For eight months I sold it the hard way, with posters and pamphlets in wholesale markets, restaurants, and PGs, until the capital ran out. I joined an accounting firm and left within days, because I knew a corporate desk would put out my hunger to build. To raise funds for my next attempt, I trained for data analyst roles and took on freelance work. Then came the lowest point: in 2026, an analytics internship in Bengaluru was cancelled at the last minute, with my bags already packed to leave Kolkata.

With no safety net and plenty of self-doubt, I chose to take full ownership. I turned to coding, systems architecture, and generative AI.

The turning point came at 18, on the floor of my local gym. I watched the staff run everything from paper registers and track fees by hand, and asked why they weren’t using software. Their answer was a challenge: “Can you show us a working demo tomorrow morning?”

I had no codebase, no prototype, and had never deployed software. My university finance exam was the same morning. I worked straight through to dawn, switching between debugging code and revising balance sheets. By morning the first version was running, and they loved it.

Over the next four months I went far beyond a simple gym tracker. I taught myself system design and built, from scratch, a multi-tenant cloud platform with an offline edge gateway for gym turnstiles.

None of it came from internet research or from copying another app. While I built it, I kept going back to gym owners and trainers across Kolkata, meeting them at the front desk, on the gym floor and after closing. Owners showed me where fees slipped through, why the cash drawer never matched the bank, and how members quietly stopped coming without anyone noticing. Trainers showed me how sessions and commissions were really tracked. Every problem they raised and every suggestion they made went onto my list, and most of them are features today: importing a gym’s existing member list straight from Excel, so switching doesn’t mean retyping a single member; a cash-in-hand versus bank check, so the drawer finally matches the books; a loyalty tracker that shows each member’s tenure and renewals; WhatsApp fee reminders instead of chasing dues one call at a time; check-in that keeps working when the internet drops; an alert for members who stop showing up; and trainer payouts worked out automatically instead of on paper.

Some of the best ideas came straight from the people I met. One gym owner asked me to protect members’ Aadhaar numbers under the DPDP Act, so GymSetora now keeps only the last four digits and a one-way hash, never the full number. A gym member pointed out that plenty of people don’t use WhatsApp at all, so we’re now building SMS reminders that reach them too. Listen on the gym floor, build, ship, go back and listen again: that loop is still how GymSetora is made.

GymSetora wasn’t designed in a meeting room. It was shaped on real gym floors, by the people who run them.

When the chance came to hand that system over, I chose to keep building it into a company. That decision became GymSetora.

“I didn’t build GymSetora to sell it. I built it to run India’s gyms.”

Today GymSetora is a complete operating system for a gym, not a tracker: memberships, UPI fee collection straight to the gym’s own account at 0% commission, GST invoicing, WhatsApp reminders, QR and turnstile check-in that keeps working offline, and staff payroll. Its Enterprise tier runs multi-branch chains, with franchise royalty splits, corporate accounts and a tamper-evident audit trail.

It is multi-tenant from day one, so the same platform serves a single-room gym and a franchise chain. It is bootstrapped and capital-efficient, and it is built by a founder who reads a balance sheet as fluently as a stack trace. Most of the gyms I meet still run on paper. That is the market GymSetora is built for, and we are just getting started.

If you’re building your gym against the odds, GymSetora was built for you. And if you’re an investor who believes Indian fitness deserves world-class infrastructure, I’d like to talk.