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Three executives were at a health and fitness industry conference last March, but it was in Las Vegas, so they were drinking old-fashioneds when they hatched a cross-border deal to create a fitness company worth $7.5 billion that spanned subscription and scheduling apps, plus equipment. The three whiskey drinkers were Fritz Lanman, CEO of Playlist, the company behind fitness subscription apps ClassPass and Mindbody; Philipp Roesch-Schlanderer of Munich-based Egym, which makes fitness equipment; and Marc Magliacano of L Catterton, a consumer-focused buyout fund. Magliacano said the trio came together as a “cabal” to float the merger idea to the companies’ existing investors, including Playlist’s private equity owner, Vista Equity Partners. The new company took the Playlist name. The combined enterprise will offer subscription and business management software for consumers and fitness companies, along with Egym’s high-tech gym equipment and programs that give employees access to fitness facilities. “Employers are now looking in our direction: ‘Can you help our workforce to make lifestyle changes so that I have less healthcare costs?’” said Roesch-Schlanderer, who will still run Egym as a subsidiary. “That basically boosts our business dramatically.” For Mindbody, the deal is the latest step in a circuitous journey from startup to public company to part of a fitness conglomerate. In 2019, Vista took Mindbody private for $1.8 billion. Two years later, it acquired ClassPass, which was worth $1 billion at the time, and investors valued the combined enterprise at around $3 billion. In 2025, Mindbody and ClassPass created Playlist as their new parent brand. The merger with Egym values the combined company at $7.5 billion, based on a $785 million capital raise from Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners, Temasek and L Catterton. Mindbody has long been expected to go public again, allowing its investors to cash out. Lanman said they’re in no rush. Each of the company’s businesses is profitable, and Playlist is bringing $800 million in revenue. However, “the plan is still to go public at some point,” he said. “We definitely could have IPO’d but decided that the best path forward was to double down on what we’re doing,” he said. Egym gives the company new products to sell and new markets to work in. Magliacano, who had known Lanman for more than a decade and Roesch-Schlanderer for a few years, introduced the two. As part of the deal, the CEOs were able to keep control of the new company. They, along with Vista’s Monti Saroya, formed a supervoting committee, a rare case in which private equity investors cede control. A Europe Tech Check Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs hosted a Disruptive Tech Symposium in London, which brought together more than 70 European startups and over a thousand investors. The event tried to raise the profiles of European AI companies, which tend to fall in the shadow of those in the U.S. But a lot of European companies are creating applications for specific business lines, said Clif Marriott, co-head of European technology, media and telecom investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Some of those include well-funded AI startups such as video company Synthesia, voice-generation startup ElevenLabs and legal software provider Legora. While Europe is behind the U.S. in the huge build-out of data centers, it’s building more, according to Marriott. Just this week, Amsterdam-based cloud provider Nebius announced a new $10 billion AI data center in Finland, and French AI lab Mistral AI raised $830 million in debt to build data centers with Nvidia chips on the Continent. Joe Porter, Goldman Sachs’ co-head of software investment banking, moved from San Francisco to London last year and was struck by the fragmentation of the European market. “It’s a bit different to me that many companies would have their full platform for each country, despite the pan European reach,” he said. That could be challenging for AI startups as they figure out how to work across different countries. But Marriott and Porter told me that European fintech stars such as Revolut, Klarna, Adyen and Wise learned early to build cross-border platforms and internationalize. That trend should continue, they said. New From Our Reporters SpaceX Makes a $75 Billion Offer Investors Can’t Refuse By Cory Weinberg Exclusive Apple Kicks Vibe Coding App Out of App Store, Escalating Crackdown By Aaron Tilley AI Infrastructure Big Tech Schools Big Energy on Powering AI By Ann Davis Vaughan
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