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.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, existing products didn’t cut it, especially when it came to supporting growth, which was an essential part of the BrightCore roadmap.Recognising the real opportunity lay in addressing this deficit, the co-founders pivoted and brought AI 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.“Mark 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,” Marren says.“That gap became impossible to ignore, and what began as a search for the right tool turned into a realisation that the tool simply didn’t 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.”Marren says current operating systems for the fitness sector are largely focused on scheduling, administration and processing transactions. Most gyms run “a disjointed stack”, 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.“BrightCore collapses all of these functions into one system and replaces the owner as the central coordinator,” Marren says. “The value of our AI-native system isn’t any single feature – it’s that the data flows between them. As of now, owners don’t 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’s going on – why someone has left, for example – and they can then do something about it.“Our pitch isn’t ‘better software’,” Marren says. “It’s 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.” [ Meet the 23-year-old building self-programming robots for US factoriesOpens in new window ]BrightCore was started on a bootstrapped budget of €45,000 from the co-founders.“We’ve kept it super lean, and Frankie’s technical expertise plus the advances in AI meant the system could be built really quickly without expensive overheads. Frankie is also very good at containing development costs,” says Marren. The company plans to launch a €1.5 million funding round later this year.BrightCore is live across Ireland, the UK and North America and has been generating income for the fledgling company since last February.Marren is a physics graduate turned digital marketer and entrepreneur. He set up an ecommerce fitness store before co-founding BrightCore. Shalloe has an MSc in marketing from the Smurfit School and a background in high-growth, data-driven environments, including Flutter Entertainment. Dolphin is a UCD engineering graduate. He too has been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, having also started an e-commerce business before joining BrightCore.Marren says the small to medium-sized business sector in this service industry is underserved, “and our competitors typically chase enterprise clients that already have the benefits of scale”.“The long tail of independent gyms, studios and saunas gets overlooked or overcharged. That’s a large, fragmented, sticky market, and the segment most exposed to failing without growth tooling.“We’re arming the small operator to grow and thrive. For the first time the technology (AI) has enabled an owner-operated business to compete with enterprise businesses on operational capacity. BrightCore is here to provide that service to them. Every gym we onboard teaches the system what works: which win-back messages convert and which lead sources are worth the spend. That feeds back into making every client’s system smarter. Overall, we are selling time back to owners, not just software,” Marren says.BrightCore has the edge in its segment for two key reasons: it has streamlined operations to create space for growth, and it’s using state-of-the-art AI to dig into what’s working for a business, whereas most competing systems are pre-AI and optimised for features such as scheduling.[ DCU spin-out solving the costly clean-energy problem of dirty wind turbinesOpens in new window ]For now, the company’s focus is on onboarding gyms, fitness, yoga and Pilates studios, and other wellness facilities with a large enough turnover to be using operations software. However, the long-term plan is to expand across all appointment-based businesses. The company will make its money on a combination of subscriptions and transaction fees.“As part of our offering, we are also turning the marketing agency model on its head,” Marren says. “Agencies charge clients a flat monthly subscription; BrightCore charges for outcomes only. Our clients don’t pay a cent unless they get new sign-ups in the door.“Basically, the marketing agency lead generation model in fitness and wellness is broken and fundamentally misaligned. Agencies charge retainers anywhere from €1,000 to €10,000 per month and get paid whether they perform or not. We believe in getting paid for results, not activity. Our system answers every call. It books the trial and takes the deposit. It also wins back the ones who left. New leads do not wait hours for a reply, and the system is on 24/7.”Marren says the founders have found the start-up ecosystem here to be supportive and thriving. He says they are “incredibly lucky” to be part of the Baseline Community, an independent community and workspace for early-stage tech companies. “That has been invaluable to us. They are a tight network of founders who’ve been through the exact challenges we’re facing and are willing to share hard-won lessons openly and connect us to the right people at the right time.”