Irish start-up Brightcore targets €30bn market with platform designed to help gym and wellness operators scale.
Three Irish entrepreneurs are betting that artificial intelligence can solve one of the biggest challenges facing fitness and wellness businesses: sustainable growth.
BrightCore, founded by Ben Marren, Mark Shalloe and Frankie Dolphin, has developed an AI-native operating system designed to help owners automate growth, improve client retention and increase operational capacity.
“Current tools in the market seek to optimise scheduling, admin and transactions. They are not tools for growth”
The company is targeting what it estimates is a €30bn total addressable market and is preparing for a pre-seed funding round later this year.
Building a growth-focused platform
The founders believe the fitness and wellness sector has become crowded with software products focused on administration rather than business growth.
“Current tools in the market seek to optimise scheduling, admin and transactions. They are not tools for growth. They don’t tell owners why clients are leaving, what marketing spend is working, or when to hire. Owners are left making critical decisions on intuition, not data.”
They also believe traditional marketing agency models often fail to align with the needs of growing businesses.
“Agencies generally charge anywhere from €1,000 to €10,000 per month and get paid whether they perform or not.”
BrightCore’s solution is to combine operational software and growth capabilities into a single platform.
“Our job is to combine current available tools and the agency model under one system to help these owners scale beyond themselves, so the business keeps running well whether they’re in the room or not.”
Founders with complementary expertise
Brightcore team: Frankie Dolphin, Ben Marren and Mark Shalloe
The company brings together expertise in sales, marketing, machine learning and technology development.
Ben Marren, the company’s CEO, is a physics graduate who previously built and scaled a fitness e-commerce business.
Mark Shalloe, BrightCore’s CMO, holds an MSc in Marketing from UCD Smurfit School and previously worked at Flutter Entertainment.
CTO Frankie Dolphin is an AI engineer with a quantitative machine learning background who has built proprietary trading algorithms and his own e-commerce business.
The three founders met through the Furthr start-up programme. Marren and Shalloe originally intended to build gyms before deciding to address the industry’s software challenges instead, while Dolphin was developing proprietary financial models for another start-up.
Putting AI to work for gym owners
At the centre of the platform is a simple idea: business owners should spend less time managing systems and more time focusing on customers.
“BrightCore is the AI-native operating system for fitness and wellness businesses that automates growth and retention, increases operational capacity, and gives owners the intelligence and infrastructure to scale beyond themselves.”
The company says the platform acts as a central operating layer for businesses that often juggle multiple systems and processes.
“BrightCore replaces the operator as the central coordinator of the business. Instead of juggling tools, chasing leads manually, and guessing what’s working, the platform handles it, freeing up time so they can go back to what they love, teaching fitness.”
The founders say the combination of an operating system and integrated growth engine is not currently available elsewhere in the sector.
Learning from customers
Like many young businesses, BrightCore’s founders acknowledge that building a company has proved more demanding than they initially expected.
“The biggest mistakes we made so far was thinking things would move quicker initially, we thought it would be a seamless process to launch BrightCore, raise funding, then scale business with ease, it turns out running a start-up is tough work!”
One of the company’s most important lessons has been the value of maintaining close relationships with customers and allowing their feedback to shape product development.
“The biggest learning has been to stay close with the right customers and let them help shape the product. Every meaningful feature we’ve built has come from a conversation with an owner.”
They added: “We speak to our clients constantly and ship in short iterations, so the platform gets shaped by what they actually need rather than what we think they need. It’s slower than building in isolation, but it means nothing we build goes unused.”
Expansion plans ahead
BrightCore has been funded entirely by its founders to date but is now preparing for its next phase of growth.
“We are fully bootstrapped so far and we’ve managed to keep costs low while scaling. We plan to raise a larger pre-seed round later this year to accelerate product development and expansion into the European and US markets.”
The founders are also positive about Ireland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and the support they have received from fellow founders.
“Ireland is a great place for start-ups, the ecosystem is thriving. We are incredibly lucky to be part of the Baseline Community, which has been invaluable to us: a tight network of founders who’ve been through the exact challenges we’re facing, willing to share hard-won lessons openly and connect us to the right people at the right time.”
For aspiring entrepreneurs, resilience remains the key lesson from their journey so far.
“In my opinion the biggest strength a founder can have is resilience, the journey won’t go to plan initially and there will be lots of setbacks, rejections and rollercoasters of emotion. If you can stick at it long enough and celebrate the small wins along the way, you’ll cover a lot of ground before you know it.”
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