The home fitness company Volava has filed for bankruptcy after recording a 60% drop in sales over the past 12 months and incurring losses that are vertiginously approaching five million euros from 2021. The up-and-coming company, which achieved meteoric success with its at-home program of stationary bikes and online personal trainers during the pandemic, has had to fold sails after being unable to refinance a bank debt of almost two million d euros. The positive news is that Volava will have continuity as a business and that its negative numbers will not, in principle, affect its subscribers, thanks to the entry of a large American investor in the sports sector that will take effect in September, as he explains the founder Joel Balagué.
Since Volava postponed its last round of financing, in February, things have been rushed for this Catalan startup, which has seen its dreams cut short with the failure of its expansion plans in Germany. This is how Joel Balagué, one of the founding partners, sums it up: "During the pandemic we sold a lot, we oversold ourselves to internationalize, but things did not turn out as we expected with the return to normality after the covid". And they plummeted.
Founded in 2017 in Barcelona, Volava started with an initial investment of one million euros, with the vision of developing software that would offer users the possibility to exercise and train from home. First they marketed smart exercise bikes, with screens to be able to follow the instructors' classes from home or access the lessons on demand. With this they attracted investment from two funds, Inveready and The Crowd Angel, which allowed them to accelerate their growth process and add boxing and running to their services. It came to employ thirty people and to invoice one million euros (2020). It was then that the German distributor Fitshop, from the Sport-Tidje group, came into play, with whom they wanted to repeat the success in Spain and which made them hire more staff. But the covid variable was decisive and the end of the pandemic put things in their place, and people back in the gyms.
Balagué was disillusioned yesterday, because the project in which he has invested all his savings - according to his own words - has gone to waste. Despite this, the entry of the American investor, whose name he cannot yet reveal, will give continuity to the business, with a workforce including - around 23 - and the headquarters in Barcelona.
