How Pallav Bihani is building Boldfit into India's dependable fitness tracking brand

Pallav Bihani, Founder, Boldfit Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India; Directed By: Kapil Kashyap Background Image: Shutterstock

Pallav Bihani walks us through three stages of his ‘fitness marriage’. To begin with, it was a ‘forced’ match. In 2012, the young lad suffered a slipped disc, doctors prescribed an epidural steroid as a stop-gap relief medicine, and Bilani was administered a bitter dose. ‘Lose weight if you want to avoid surgery’ came a stern warning. Weighing some 105-odd kilos, the class XII student was constantly body-shamed and had a fat chance of leading a healthy life had he ignored the red flag. Bihani, however, didn’t. “That’s how I was ‘forced’ into the world of fitness,” he recalls.

Thanks to a disciplined fitness regime, Bihani lost some 30 kilos in three years. “Now, I was romancing with fitness,” he says, alluding to the second stage of his marriage. “I was eating, drinking and thinking fitness,” he adds. Three years later, in 2018, he graduated to the third stage. “I fell in love with fitness and started Boldfit,” adds Bihani, who worked in the family business of medical equipment and pharmacies for two years in Bengaluru, took a loan of ₹10 lakh from his father in 2018, and rolled out Boldfit, a D2C brand of fitness and sports products.

Why Boldfit? There were umpteen fitness and sports products brands. So, why add one more? Bihani reckons that there was a yawning gap and a pressing need. Boldfit was not a vitamin. It was a painkiller. Bihani explains. that the sports and fitness market in India behaved like a pendulum. On one side was a raft of premium multinational brands that were prohibitively expensive and catered to a niche, and on the other end were countless desi companies that pedalled cheap products. What was missing was a high-quality yet affordable offering for the masses. “Boldfit was the answer,” says 29-year-old Bihani. “We bridged that gap between price and aspiration,” he underlines. 

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Fast forward to November 2024. After a bootstrapped journey of over six years, Boldfit raised its first institutional funding round of $13 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Starting with two yoga mats in 2018, Boldfit shipped over a million fitness products last December. “In FY24, we clocked a revenue of close to ₹140 crore and are profitable,” he claims, adding that the company is clocking a run rate of ₹300 crore for FY25. The Bengaluru-based startup had previously raised $8.37 million from its existing angels, including Indian cricketer KL Rahul.