There are more than 2,000 gyms, exercise and wellness facilities across Ireland. If Ben Marren and Mark Shalloe had pushed ahead with their original plan to develop a chain of fitness studios, there would have been even more.<\/p>\n
Marren and Shalloe began working on their idea for BrightCore in January 2025 while taking part in the Furthr masterclass series for company founders. On paper their proposition seemed straightforward. However, when the founders went looking for operations software to underpin the fitness studio business<\/a>, existing products didn\u2019t cut it, especially when it came to supporting growth, which was an essential part of the BrightCore roadmap.<\/p>\n Recognising the real opportunity lay in addressing this deficit, the co-founders pivoted and brought AI<\/a> engineer Frankie Dolphin on board as a co-founder. Dolphin turned their vision from operating a chain of studios into what has become the BrightCore operating system for gym and studio management.<\/p>\n \u201cMark and I were initially on a mission to build our own chain of fitness studios across Ireland. But as we dug into the tools that were supposed to help us grow, we realised something: every platform out there could take a booking or process a payment, but not a single one was actually built to help a fitness business scale,\u201d Marren says.<\/p>\n \u201cThat gap became impossible to ignore, and what began as a search for the right tool turned into a realisation that the tool simply didn\u2019t exist, so we decided to build it ourselves with the focus on creating something that was really quick and easy for busy owners to use.\u201d<\/p>\n Marren says current operating systems for the fitness sector are largely focused on scheduling, administration and processing transactions. Most gyms run \u201ca disjointed stack\u201d, meaning they have one tool for bookings and payments, another for CRM (customer relations management), a separate email for marketing and something like a WhatsApp account to manually manage new business leads.<\/p>\n \u201cBrightCore collapses all of these functions into one system and replaces the owner as the central coordinator,\u201d Marren says. \u201cThe value of our AI-native system isn\u2019t any single feature \u2013 it\u2019s that the data flows between them. As of now, owners don\u2019t know why clients are leaving, what marketing spend is working or when to hire. They are left making critical decisions on intuition, not data. We collect the data so an owner knows what\u2019s going on \u2013 why someone has left, for example \u2013 and they can then do something about it.<\/p>\n \u201cOur pitch isn\u2019t \u2018better software\u2019,\u201d Marren says. \u201cIt\u2019s that the boring, revenue-critical work (marketing, admin, chasing no-shows, win-backs, upsells, lead follow-up, memberships, payments and bookings) all happens automatically, and owners can focus on what actually grows their business.\u201d <\/p>\n