Once in a while, we have the privilege of finding an instant connection with founding teams. From the moment we met co-founders Rachel Lea Fishman and Josh Archer, we were drawn in. They possessed the characteristics Inspired seeks in all founders: an authentic connection to a problem, coupled with a willingness to go unreasonably deep in their investigation of a solution.

A former yoga instructor and product manager with an insatiable desire for improving customer experiences, Rachel Lea was confounded by the operational inefficiency of most studios. Despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology to run their business, most studios had front desks defined by a deluge of sticky notes, pads of paper, and blinking landlines. 

In 2020, they launched Arketa on the foundation of two major insights: 

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After years of being forced to pick from an array of point solutions, customers desperately wanted a product that did everything.

For decades, small businesses in the wellness industry have been relegated to vanilla point solutions. What would it look like for a modern software platform to actually manage the lionshare of a customers’ opex? To not only build a delightful, enterprise-grade booking and payments experience as a baseline, but to also manage web and mobile creation, marketing, growth, and brand efforts, and more – everything truly required by an owner?

If the first era of vertical software was about the shift to cloud, and the second was about incremental expansion of product offerings (like financial services), the third – Vertical SaaS 3.0 – will be about leveraging AI to build feature-complete platforms increasingly bespoke to end markets. Arketa’s vision is a perfect representation of this future. 

In doing so, modern vertical software becomes the distribution mechanism through which global small business accesses the latest and greatest AI functionality. With thousands of customers on platform, the wellness market is voting with its feet that Arketa is their solution of choice. Our favorite line from a customer call: “We couldn’t live without Arketa. It's vital to our daily operations. It's vital for us to engage with our clients. It's vital to us to translate what's going on in the studio into dollars in the bank.”

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The health and wellness market will continue its dramatic ascension.

In the 2010s, big box gyms gave way to boutique studios as a primary mechanism of fitness. This unleashed a global long tail of SMB studios across almost every physical activity, including many of the brands and franchises that define the morning routines and monthly spend habits of modern consumers. As of 2024, consumer directed spend towards health and wellness had ballooned to a whopping $1.8T, with physical activity representing a large portion of this headline number. 

The centralization of wellness in the modern psyche, coupled with the entrepreneurial nature of today’s creator economy, has furthered the explosion of the health and wellness businesses. Today there are millions of SMBs across the world – from single location, community-centric climbing gyms, to multi-national franchises, to viral online fitness influencers – all of whom seek a way to run their business as autonomously as possible so they can focus on what matters.

We are thrilled to partner with Arketa on this next phase of their journey, alongside our friends at First Round, Y-Combinator, Amity, and Fitt Capital.

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