Backed by TicketSwap and Moneybird founders, Huppa closes €1M pre-seed

Huppa, an Amsterdam-based SportsTech company, has raised €1 million in pre-seed funding for its all-in-one management platform aimed at fitness studios and gyms.

The round was led by a group of entrepreneurs rather than a single institutional lead — among them the founders of Sentia, Keylane, TicketSwap, Moneybird and Revue. NL SportTech Ventures, an early-stage VC firm focused on Dutch sports technology, also participated. The mix is notable for a pre-seed cheque in the fitness-software niche: a cluster of operator-founders from Dutch SaaS and ticketing businesses, plus a sector-specific fund.

Huppa's product is a unified operating system for fitness businesses. Rather than stitching together separate tools, the platform handles member management, class scheduling, payments and financial reporting in one place. The company was set up by Sharief Mohamed and Gino Arendsz to address the operational frustrations gym owners run into with fragmented, outdated software, and it positions itself as a digital partner for group-based fitness businesses — the class-driven studios and CrossFit boxes that make up its core market.

Huppa plans to use the new capital on continued development of the gym management platform and on expanding its internal team, as it pursues growth within the Netherlands and Belgium.

Those two markets are the company's stated focus, and the geography shapes the competitive question. Class-based studios typically run on a patchwork of booking tools, payment providers and spreadsheet accounting, a setup that works at one location but strains as owners add sites or class types. Consolidating those functions into a single system is the pitch Huppa is taking to Dutch and Belgian gym operators — and the reason a group of founders with scaling experience in Dutch software companies is backing it at this stage.

For NL SportTech Ventures, the deal adds another early-stage bet to a portfolio explicitly built around Dutch sports technology, a category that has drawn steady, if unspectacular, venture attention compared with consumer fitness apps.

At €1 million, the round is a typical European pre-seed, sized to fund product work and a small hiring push rather than a land grab. Huppa's next test will be converting studio owners in two neighbouring markets away from the tools they already use — a sales problem as much as a software one.