With active users already spanning over 40 countries, 1club is demonstrating that a global-from-day-one strategy can effectively disrupt the fragmented sports management landscape. The athletic sector has long struggled with a patchwork of legacy software and manual entry systems that frustrate both club owners and participants. This inefficiency has finally met its match as founders Miroslav Miroslavov and Martin Kirov apply their deep expertise in flexible workspace management to the fitness world. By securing a seed round of €2.2 million, the startup is poised to replace the clunky, multi-step booking processes of the past with a sophisticated, AI-driven environment. This injection of capital marks a turning point for an industry that has remained surprisingly analog despite the digital boom seen in other service-oriented markets. The vision is to provide a unified infrastructure that manages everything from member retention to court reservations with unprecedented ease and technical precision.
The Evolution: From OfficeRnD to the Next Frontier in Athletics
The momentum behind 1club is largely fueled by the “second-time founder” advantage, as the leadership team brings a wealth of knowledge from their previous success at OfficeRnD. During his tenure there, Miroslavov scaled a coworking management platform to support over 3,000 customers on a global scale, proving that flexible space management requires a unique blend of automation and user-centric design. This background provided a perfect blueprint for tackling the complexities of the sports industry, which operates on many of the same principles as the coworking model. The ability to manage high-traffic facilities, handle recurring memberships, and optimize space utilization is a skill set that translates seamlessly from the office to the gym. By leveraging this established playbook, the founders have bypassed the typical early-stage trial and error, allowing them to focus on high-level strategic growth and sophisticated product development right from the start.
Despite the rapid advancement of technology in retail and hospitality, the sports and fitness sector has remained trapped in a cycle of technological stagnation. Fitness enthusiasts frequently find themselves navigating disjointed platforms just to book a simple tennis court or attend a yoga class, often facing barriers like outdated interfaces and unreliable payment gateways. Miroslavov identified this gap not just as a business opportunity, but as a personal frustration, recognizing that the lack of integrated infrastructure was holding back the growth of athletic communities. The transition from a board-level role at a successful company back to the high-intensity startup environment was driven by a desire to modernize these “analog” systems once and for all. Joining forces with Martin Kirov, the team set out to build a platform that treats sports management as a seamless digital experience rather than a series of administrative hurdles that drain time from owners.
Dual-Platform Innovation: Streamlining B2B and B2C Operations
At the heart of the company’s technological offering is 1club.ai, a robust business-to-business management platform designed to serve as a comprehensive operating system for facility owners. This tool integrates several disparate functions—including membership tracking, staff scheduling, automated payment processing, and digital marketing—into a single, intuitive interface. By consolidating these features, 1club eliminates the need for club managers to juggle multiple software subscriptions or resort to manual data entry, which often leads to costly errors. The inclusion of AI-native capabilities allows the platform to offer predictive insights into member behavior and facility usage, enabling owners to make data-driven decisions that improve profitability. This level of technical sophistication ensures that even small local clubs can compete with larger franchises by providing a professional, tech-forward service that meets the high expectations of modern customers.
Complementing the management side of the business is 1club.me, a consumer-facing marketplace that functions as an open network for sports discovery and participation. This platform allows individuals to find, book, and pay for activities across a wide variety of disciplines without the friction associated with traditional registration processes. Crucially, the founders have adopted an “open ecosystem” philosophy, which distinguishes them from competitors that attempt to lock businesses into a closed loop. By allowing sports providers to receive bookings from multiple sources, 1club prioritizes the visibility and revenue growth of its clients over platform-exclusive dominance. This approach fosters a more vibrant and accessible sports community, where enthusiasts can explore new hobbies and facilities can fill their schedules more efficiently. The synergy between the management software and the public marketplace creates a powerful dual-sided network that drives value for all.
Global Reach and Future Standards: Scaling the Sports Ecosystem
Following a “global-from-day-one” philosophy, 1club has bypassed the traditional route of focusing on a local home market. The company is currently targeting major English-speaking regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, leveraging the playbook used during the expansion of OfficeRnD. This strategy has already proven effective, with the platform currently serving paying customers in over ten countries and supporting active users in more than forty locations worldwide. The team’s focus on high-impact hires ensures that they maintain the agility necessary to navigate these diverse markets without the typical friction of rapid scaling. By building a lean team of seasoned experts, the startup can refine its go-to-market approach in real-time, ensuring that the software remains responsive to the unique needs of global fitness providers while maintaining a high standard of engineering excellence and reliability.
Ultimately, the successful closure of the €2.2 million seed round established 1club as a primary architect of digital infrastructure for the global sports community. Facility owners who adopted the platform witnessed a significant reduction in administrative overhead, allowing them to focus more on member experience and less on manual data entry. The evolution of this AI-native system demonstrated that the integration of B2B management tools with an open B2C marketplace could effectively solve long-standing fragmentation within the industry. Moving forward, stakeholders were encouraged to prioritize technical interoperability and user-centric design to remain competitive in an increasingly digital fitness market. By applying the lessons learned from the coworking industry, the founders provided a clear template for how traditional service sectors can be modernized through strategic automation and a refusal to compromise on talent or quality.
