Back to the Sports Tech Newsfeed

How Freeletics Became The No. 1 Fitness App In Europe

NEW YORK — The ultimatum had been made by Daniel Sobhani and his handful of teammates at health and fitness app Freeletics: make money or move on.

“We were very close to killing the project then,” recalls Sobhani of the Munich, Germany-based bootstrapped startup during a media tour.

That was early 2013, when Sobhani — the company’s Chief Executive Officer — said he and his colleagues were rejected by all of the potential investors they had discussions with, calling the feedback “quite harsh and super demotivating.” He explained that there were two main points of concern presented by the venture capital firms.