Fitness Ventures
The Firm
Fitness Ventures started in 2016 with two Crunch clubs, one in Athens, Georgia and one in Amarillo, Texas, and under founder and CEO Brian Hibbard grew into the largest franchisee in the Crunch system: 118 locations across thirty states serving close to a million members. In 2024 it took investment from Meaningful Partners, a Los Angeles and Austin firm focused on health and well-being businesses.
Its own account of the growth is half organic, half bought: eleven to twelve new club openings a year since 2022, alongside portfolio acquisitions, Louisville in 2022, Portland and South Texas in 2025, and twenty-three clubs from Harman Fitness in early 2026. The Portland deal came with a stated seventy-five million dollar plan to build fifteen more clubs at forty to fifty thousand square feet each, which tells you the scale it operates at.
For a gym searcher the lesson is structural: independent gyms compete with, and sometimes sell to, franchise platforms like this one, and the platforms buy in multi-club blocks, not single locations. Anyone meeting the firm should know the 2016 two-club origin, the No Judgments operating culture it runs under the Crunch brand, and that its stated model pairs high-volume clubs with heavy reinvestment in facilities.
What It Buys
Athens, Georgia area. Crunch Fitness clubs bought in whole-market portfolios, three in Portland here, twenty-three from another franchisee there, which makes it the buyer that resets gym pricing in any metro it targets.
Selling to them one day, or watching them as the other bidder? Track them in the Contact Book so the relationship has a next-touch date.
Confirmed Deals
Every deal traced to the firm's own announcement.
- Three South Texas Crunch clubs · December 8, 2025
Crunch Brownsville, North Brownsville, and Edinburg, per its own release.
- Three Portland Crunch clubs · August 1, 2025
The existing Portland market, with a stated $75 million plan for fifteen more.