The UAE-based children’s jiu-jitsu academy network has raised $2M to open in Riyadh and Monaco. Founder and CEO Andrej Kuprejev walked us through the round, a teaching model built around a specific ratio, and a customer acquisition engine that barely touches advertising.
A GMNSM session runs ninety minutes. Sixty on the mats, thirty sitting down, working on goal-setting, emotional resilience and problem-solving.
That ratio is the whole product. It explains why the company describes itself as a child development business rather than a sports club, why it prices the way it does, and why its name is not a technology acronym: GMNSM is a contraction of gymnasion, the ancient Greek institution where physical training went hand in hand with intellectual and personal development.
Founded in Dubai in 2022 by Andrej Kuprejev, the company announced a $2 million round in late August. We spoke with him about what the raise funds, the acquisition mechanics that made it possible, and the challenge he considers hardest to solve — which is not growth.
The round, and what it funds
GMNSM raised $2 million from investment firm VEYRA Capital, whose portfolio includes companies such as Dwelly, ZINIT and Tyred, alongside a private investor.
The money funds two openings over the next 12 to 18 months: the network’s first jiu-jitsu academy in Riyadh, and its first European location in Monaco. The UK, Switzerland and Spain are lined up as the next steps.
The starting point is not trivial for a network this size: 11 academies across the UAE, Qatar and Cyprus, more than 700 members — children and adults — and headcount set to grow from 40 to 60 by the end of 2026. The curriculum covers Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo and gymnastics.
“A recommendation from another family carries more weight than any advertisement”
Asked about acquisition channels, Kuprejev starts with the least scalable one of all.
“Our growth has always been driven primarily by trust and word of mouth,” he says. “Parents are very careful about who they choose to work with their children, so a recommendation from another family often carries more weight than any advertisement.”
The mechanism that converts that trust into enrolment has an in-house name: the Hero Assessment. It is not a trial class. It is an initial assessment of the child’s abilities, personality and character, run at intake.
The distinction is worth pausing on. A trial class asks the prospect to judge the product; an assessment asks the product to judge the prospect — and hands the parent something they did not walk in with, namely a read on their own child. “This helps build trust with parents from the very beginning and encourages them to continue with the program.”
Around that core, the company runs events, international camps, competitions and partnerships with schools and family-oriented organisations — all of them, Kuprejev says, ways “to give parents an opportunity to experience the GMNSM approach before making a decision.”
Trust borrowed from PSG
One asset accelerates that work in markets where GMNSM has no track record: the company is the global master licensee for the Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) Academy Judo program, running martial arts and child development centres in partnership with the club.
For an unknown brand approaching parents on the most sensitive subject there is, the shortcut is substantial. The club’s recognition covers the first third of the distance; the Hero Assessment covers the rest.
Digital channels, meanwhile, are scaling up as the company enters new markets. Their job is less to generate volume than to carry the difference: “We are not simply teaching sports — we combine physical development with emotional intelligence, soft skills and confidence-building.”
An ICP defined by a philosophy, not a budget
GMNSM’s ideal customer is a parent who sees sport as more than physical activity. As the network expanded across the GCC, that profile became more international without changing in kind: families from very different cultural backgrounds, but one shared mindset — parents willing to invest in their child’s long-term development rather than in an after-school slot.
That framing has a direct consequence for expansion strategy, and Kuprejev states it plainly: “We are not trying to build a mass-market sports franchise. We want to build a community around a shared philosophy of child development, where parents, coaches and children understand that the goal is not simply to win competitions, but to prepare children for life.”
The stated objective is therefore not to maximise lead count, but to attract families who genuinely share the philosophy. That is a comfortable position when demand exceeds supply. It will be less comfortable in Monaco or London, where GMNSM starts from zero.
What changed in twelve months
Why raise now? Kuprejev points to three trends that converged.
The first is a parental concern that has gone mainstream. “In an increasingly digital and AI-driven world, there is growing concern about children spending too much time behind screens and not developing the physical, social and emotional skills they need to navigate the real world.”
The second is a reshaping of extracurricular demand. Families no longer pick an activity to fill a few hours after school, but for what it leaves the child with as an adult. A market for occupying children is becoming a market for developing them — and the two do not price the same way.
The third is internal. “We now have 11 academies and more than 700 members across the GCC and Cyprus, which gives investors confidence that this is not just a concept — it is a model that can be scaled.”
The stated challenge is not growth, it is speed
Asked about his main obstacles, Kuprejev names neither capital, nor hiring, nor competition. He names pace.
“The goal is not to grow as quickly as possible. It is to scale responsibly without compromising the quality of the experience we provide to children and their families. That is probably the most important challenge and the one we are most focused on solving.”
The difficulty is concrete. GMNSM is entering markets whose cultural expectations around education and sport differ sharply from the Gulf’s — Saudi Arabia and Monaco having, on this particular ground, almost nothing in common. The company frames that as an opportunity rather than a limitation, provided it adapts how it communicates its philosophy and builds trust market by market.
Still, for a model whose promise rests on coaching quality, every opening is a dilution risk. Which is precisely the problem the next building block is meant to solve.
Allim AI: instrument quality before you duplicate
GMNSM has built Allim AI, a proprietary lesson audit platform that analyses coaching performance, student engagement and retention.
The tool’s first job is maintaining consistency from one academy to the next, which is the precondition for geographic expansion. But Kuprejev stresses the second effect above all: improved student retention. In a subscription model built on families, that is the economic lever, not a comfort metric — and it is what justifies industrialising quality control before the openings rather than after.
Beyond the launches planned across the GCC and Europe, the company is exploring a considerably wider path: making its model transferable to other sports and enabling other operators to adopt the GMNSM approach. In other words, moving from running academies to selling the method — a shift the audit platform makes technically credible, since it is what would guarantee quality inside someone else’s business.
Three takeaways for growth teams
Make your onboarding an assessment, not a trial. GMNSM’s Hero Assessment replaces the free trial class, where the prospect judges the product, with a diagnostic where the product judges the prospect. The parent leaves with information they did not have about their own child, and the company leaves with a qualification. Look at what your intake step gives back to the prospect: if the answer is “a preview,” you are leaving trust on the table.
Borrow the recognition you have not earned yet. The global PSG Academy Judo licence does in a new market what word of mouth takes years to build. On an emotionally loaded purchase, a known partner does not reinforce the brand — it stands in for it until the first families start talking. Identify who already holds your audience’s trust, and what you can offer them in return.
Instrument quality before you duplicate, not after. Allim AI was built to audit lessons while the network had eleven sites, not forty. In a subscription model, retention is the growth lever, and it turns on execution quality that nobody measures while it is still good. The metric worth building is the one that will warn you at site twelve, not the one that reassures you at site eleven.