Dubai's Enhance raises $18.2M to export its gym software to America

A Dubai startup that started as a personal-training service has quietly become the operating system for some of America's biggest gym chains. Enhance, founded in 2018 by Tarek Mounir, just closed an $18.2 million round split between equity and venture debt — with Global Ventures leading the equity portion and Stride Ventures providing the debt. The money is not for flashy marketing or a new headquarters. It is earmarked to accelerate Enhance's push into the United States, where its enterprise software has been licensed since January 2025 and is already running in more than 700 clubs, including Crunch Fitness, UFC Gym, In-Shape Family Fitness, and PureGym USA.

For those who track Middle East capital flows, this is not just another funding announcement. Enhance is among the first GCC-built software platforms to be exported and deployed at scale in the US — a rare reverse of the usual direction, where American tech dominates the region. The company now supports 15,000 personal trainers and books over 500,000 sessions monthly across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and the US. Revenue has compounded at 65% annually since 2019, according to the company. The round also diversifies Enhance's capital structure, blending equity with venture debt — a sign that lenders are warming to GCC tech scale-ups with proven revenue models.

To understand why this matters, you need to know the fitness industry's dirty secret: personal training is the most profitable revenue line for gyms, yet it remains the least systematised. Most high-volume, low-price (HVLP) gyms — think Crunch or Planet Fitness — treat PT as an afterthought, leaving trainers to hustle for clients on their own. Enhance's software turns that chaos into predictable revenue. At mature sites using Enhance, PT revenues can hit $85,000 per club per month, the company says. For a gym with 10,000 to 12,000 members, converting just 3-4% of them into PT clients can generate income comparable to the entire membership base. That is a compelling pitch, and it explains why a Dubai-founded platform is now embedded in some of America's largest chains.

The GCC angle here is twofold. First, Enhance's anchor partner in the region is GymNation, for whom it runs the entire PT operation end-to-end across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain. Second, Saudi Arabia is Enhance's fastest-growing market outside the US — and the company says it is seeing more first-time formal fitness participants there than anywhere else. That reflects a structural shift in Gulf consumer behaviour: gym-goers are no longer satisfied with just lifting weights; they want guidance on strength, recovery, and long-term health span. In some GCC markets, demand for qualified trainers is outpacing supply, meaning the ceiling for software like Enhance's is far above where the market sits today.

What does this signal about Middle East wealth? For years, the region's tech success stories were consumer apps or fintech serving local populations. Enhance points to a new model: building deep, enterprise-grade software in the Gulf and selling it to the world's most competitive markets. The company's three-to-five-year vision is to become the system of record for the $42 billion global PT market — the default platform gym operators rely on, much as hotels use property management software or restaurants use reservation systems. That category does not exist yet, and Enhance is trying to build it from Dubai.

The next chapter will be about execution, not just capital. Enhance is pursuing strategic partnerships with US enterprise gym groups that want to outsource their entire PT operation, not just license software. If it succeeds, it will prove that the GCC can produce not just unicorns but category-defining platforms. And for a region often seen as a consumer of technology rather than a creator, that would be a genuinely new story.