Noa raises €5M to establish premium online fitness in the French market
The essentials. Noa, a Paris-based startup founded by Guillaume Sztejnberg, Shreyas Rajagopalan and Jason Akakpo, announces a €5 million seed round. Founders Future is leading the round, alongside Kima Ventures, Drysdale, Eden and Intuition. The goal: create a premium online fitness brand focused on women, built around a pilates and strength training app.
Key takeaways
- €5M raised in seed — Noa's first funding round, announced on June 1, 2026.
- Lead investor Founders Future, cofounded by Marc Ménasé, known for its early-stage bets in consumer digital.
- Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel) confirms its interest in the digital wellness/fitness segment.
- Two of the three founders (Sztejnberg and Rajagopalan) have already built AppTurbo (€15M in revenue) and Green Panda Games (800M+ downloads, acquired by Ubisoft in 2019).
- The noa fit app is available on the App Store at €19.99/month or €119.99/year, developed by SMASH SAS (Paris).
What Noa Does
Noa positions itself as a premium digital fitness studio. The app — noa fit — offers pilates, cardio and strength training sessions led by international coaches. The stated priority: audio quality, art direction and progressive programming, not content volume.
The product was designed for women first. The guiding thread is structured coaching: rather than leaving users to pick their own sessions, the app provides week-by-week guidance, with programs that adapt to individual goals. Offline access is included in the subscription.
The pricing is deliberately premium: €19.99/month or €119.99/year. That's 2 to 3 times the average price of generalist fitness apps like Nike Training Club (free) or Freeletics (around €60/year). Noa owns that gap, betting on execution quality and a hand-picked community of coaches.
In the market, direct competitors in Europe are Alo Moves (US-based, strong in yoga/pilates), Peloton App (scaling back hardware, refocusing on software), and French apps like Urban Sports Club or Gymlib — the latter targeting physical gyms more than digital content. Noa targets a different niche: the active woman who consumes premium content on mobile, without a gym membership.
The roadmap calls for extending the offering to nutrition, meditation, sleep tracking, and menstrual cycle tracking — a classic pivot toward holistic wellness (wellness stack) that US players like Flo Health and Hers are already pursuing.
Funding round details
- Amount: €5 million
- Date: June 2026
- Round: Seed
- Lead investor: Founders Future
- Co-investors: Kima Ventures, Drysdale, Eden, Intuition, and business angels from the mobile industry
- Total raised to date: €5M (first announced round)
- Headquarters: Paris, France (SMASH SAS entity)
- Founders: Guillaume Sztejnberg (ex-AppTurbo, ex-Green Panda Games), Shreyas Rajagopalan (ex-AppTurbo, ex-Green Panda Games), Jason Akakpo
- Use of funds: Strengthening the teams, accelerating app development
Why this funding round matters
Five million euros at seed is a significant round for a mobile app at this stage. Most fitness apps bootstrap until their first million users or raise €1–2M at most. Noa arrives with brand ambition from day one.
Two signals are worth noting.
First, the founders' track record. Sztejnberg and Rajagopalan are not first-time entrepreneurs: AppTurbo reached €15M in annual revenue, and Green Panda Games accumulated 800 million downloads before being acquired by Ubisoft in 2019. These two exits give them credibility in mass-market mobile distribution that most fitness founders lack. They know how to acquire users at scale on the app stores — which is precisely the bottleneck in digital wellness.
Second, the choice of the female segment. [UNIQUE INSIGHT] The general digital fitness market has been saturated since the COVID peak of 2020-2021. By contrast, a premium-positioned pilates/strength training app designed for women, with particular attention to design and audio, sits on more defensible ground. The barriers to imitation are less technical than cultural: it takes taste, credible coaches, and a community that sees itself in the product. That is precisely where operators with mobile brand-building experience can build a lasting moat — unlike a simple content aggregator.
The round is led by Founders Future. This fund is known for early-stage bets on founder-first projects, often in consumer digital. The presence of Kima (Xavier Niel) is an additional signal of legitimacy in the French tech ecosystem — Kima systematically co-invests at this stage, rarely as lead, so its presence here is an endorsement, not a takeover.
The main risk remains retention. The fitness industry is known for high churn: the majority of users abandon an app within the first 30 days. The premium positioning and the weekly coaching structure are designed to counter this pattern, but these are assumptions that need to be validated with cohort data — which Noa has not yet published at this stage.
What this funding round reveals about the digital fitness market in 2026
Noa's funding round is part of a broader reshaping of the digital wellness segment that goes well beyond the French case.
Post-COVID consolidation leaves room for a second wave of premium apps
Between 2020 and 2023, the major digital fitness platforms (Peloton, Beachbody, Mirror) suffered violent corrections after physical gyms rebounded. The result: a market that is more realistic on valuations, but not structurally dead. Users acquired during COVID kept an appetite for digital that complements — not replaces — the physical. This "premium complement" niche is better served by a specialized app than by a generalist one. That's Noa's bet.
French early-stage funds are betting on consumer mobile again
Founders Future and Kima Ventures are two players that managed to stay active in early-stage consumer while many French funds pivoted to B2B SaaS or deeptech after 2022. The fact that they are investing together at seed stage in a pure consumer mobile play — with no defensive proprietary technology — suggests these funds see a window of opportunity in premium wellness. The combination of brand + large-scale mobile distribution remains under-invested in Europe vs the United States.
The female "wellness stack" is becoming a segment in its own right
The roadmap announced by Noa (nutrition, meditation, menstrual cycle) is a pattern also seen at Flo Health (400 M+ female users), Natural Cycles, or Clue. These apps have proven that a woman willing to pay for her health and well-being has an LTV (customer lifetime value) well above the average for general fitness apps. Noa uses fitness as its entry point to progressively build this stack. It's a coherent strategy — provided the company doesn't spread itself too thin too early and first proves retention on the core product.
FAQ
Who are the founders of Noa?
Noa was founded by Guillaume Sztejnberg, Shreyas Rajagopalan, and Jason Akakpo. Sztejnberg and Rajagopalan previously co-founded AppTurbo (€15M in annual revenue), then Green Panda Games (800 M+ downloads, acquired by Ubisoft in 2019). Jason Akakpo joined them for this third venture together.
How much has Noa raised in total?
€5 million, announced in June 2026. This is the startup's first official funding round.
Who are Noa's main investors?
The round is led by Founders Future, with participation from Kima Ventures (Xavier Niel), Drysdale, Eden, Intuition, and several business angels from the consumer mobile sector.
How much does the Noa subscription cost?
The noa fit app is available on the App Store for €19.99/month or €119.99/year (i.e. €10/month with an annual subscription). The app is developed by SMASH SAS, the Paris-based company behind Noa.
What will the €5M raised by Noa be used for?
According to the founders' public statements, the funds will be used to strengthen the teams and accelerate the app's development, notably its expansion into nutrition, meditation, sleep tracking and menstrual cycle tracking.