Binectics is the operating system for fitness — a marketplace and operational platform serving gyms, trainers, dietitians, and the people they work with across 52 countries. We're 28 humans, three offices, and one strong opinion: software should get out of the way.
The first version of Binectics was a spreadsheet. The founder was running a strength gym in Cape Town and trying to manage 142 members in Google Sheets. Everything you'd expect went wrong.
In 2023, Lerato Mokoena ran Iron Lab in Sea Point. Four locations, 22 coaches, a sheet of paper at the front desk for check‑ins. The sheet got lost twice in one week. Lerato spent her Sundays reconciling SnapScan receipts against a Google Sheet against a printed register.
The software she could buy was either built for Crunch Gym (and priced for it) or for a single trainer with three clients (and useless past that). The local fitness marketplace was Instagram DMs. There was nothing in the middle.
So we built it. The first version went live in Cape Town in March 2024 with three gyms, twelve trainers, and one nutritionist. The second came live in Lagos six months later. By the time we hit a year, we'd grown to 8 countries and a thousand providers.
Today the platform processes $4.8M of bookings every month across 52 countries — and the spreadsheet is still sitting on Lerato's laptop, untouched since the day the kiosk app shipped.
The platform's growth is matched by an opinion about what's left out. We don't run flash sales. We don't sell ads. We charge a transparent platform fee and let providers run their own businesses on top.
Three rules we wrote down on day one and haven't broken since. They sound obvious. They are obvious. The competition doesn't follow them.
Trainers pick their prices. Gyms set their cancellation policies. Dietitians own their methodology. We never recommend what to charge. Marketplaces that price-set become race-to-the-bottoms; we'd rather earn 5% of work that's worth it.
Payments settle directly to provider bank accounts. We never hold funds beyond the gateway settlement period. Float isn't our business model. It would compromise the trust the whole platform runs on.
The product is a tool, not a relationship. We don't gamify, we don't push, we don't optimize for daily active users. We optimize for sessions completed and providers who renew. One measures pretending. The other measures fit.
Twenty‑eight people across Cape Town, Lagos, Berlin, and one in Sydney who refuses to relocate. Founding team below — the rest live on the careers page.
Ran Iron Lab for 7 years before starting Binectics. Holds the company's only NSCA‑CSCS certification on the engineering team.
Coached over a hundred providers onto the platform. Still trains a small client list on Wednesdays.
RD with 12 years in clinical practice. Designed the meal‑plan builder so dietitians could stop using Excel.
Stripe before Binectics. Believes payments should be boring, and runs the team that makes them so.
A milestone-only timeline. Each one represents months of unglamorous work — the kind that's not worth a blog post but compounds into a product worth using.
Three gyms, twelve trainers, one nutritionist. Hand‑held onboarding. We knew everyone's name.
First country outside South Africa. Local rails meant 4× higher conversion on the first day.
The signature moment of the platform. The kiosk app rewrote how a gym opens its doors at 5am.
Verified providers ticked over 10,000 across 18 countries. We slowed down marketing for two months to make sure operations could keep up.
Trainers can program a 12‑week strength block in 8 minutes. The first feature we shipped that members ask for by name.
Live in 52 countries. Verification SLA holding at 36 hours. The platform feels finished and the work is just beginning.
iOS and Android. We waited until we knew exactly what to build instead of shipping a watered‑down PWA.
If we need it. The plan is to stay capital‑efficient long enough that we don't.
Free to start, three minutes to publish. Or — if our principles resonate — we're hiring across engineering, design, and provider success.