Bringing SaaS to a wellness business

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What could be better than a B2B SaaS business? How about one with a network of gyms and a significant consumer-facing component?

That’s corporate wellness provider Wellhub, which achieved unicorn status in 2023 when it raised $85 million in Series F funding and was valued at $2.4 billion. Wellhub, formerly Gympass until a 2024 rebrand, has nearly 40,000 corporate clients, including Unilever, Aflac, TikTok, Citizens Bank, Telefonica, and Santander.

Employers pay a yearly fee to join Wellhub, which then allows their employees to buy monthly subscriptions that give them access to Wellhub’s extensive network of gyms, studios, personal trainers, and apps. In October 2025, the company became the largest fitness network in the US when it partnered with Anytime Fitness, a gym chain with more than 5,500 locations. In December, Wellhub hit a milestone when employee members logged 1 billion total “check-ins,” or times participating in wellness activities, up from 100 million in 2022.

Bruno Annicq joined the fast-growing company as CFO in 2020, attracted by the fact that it was not a traditional SaaS business and the chance of making a big impact. He spoke with CFO Brew about why Wellhub is a unique blend of a SaaS and benefits company, which KPI he always tracks, and what he looks for in prospective team members.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You mentioned net revenue retention or NRR as a metric that’s important to you. Can you explain why this matters so much?

Why Cesar [Carvalho], the co-founder and CEO, hired me, is because I came from a B2B SaaS background. Net dollar retention, or net revenue retention, is really important in a software business, because it’s all recurring…In our ecosystem, to me, the nucleus where everything starts is the client. [When] we sign a new logo…I want to track that relationship over time, and I want to see, after the first year, how much value are we driving from that relationship, and is that value growing continuously over time?

It’s interesting to me that you think of Wellhub as a SaaS company, rather than, say, a benefits company.

You could argue most of our profitability is the fixed fee the company pays for our platform. And that looks very much like a software subscription. It’s a monthly fee, annual contracts, etc. But unlike a traditional SaaS business, we have this B2B-to-C component, because once we’ve sold into a company, then we need their employees to sign up. HR is a big partner for us to drive engagement, but still, if our platform sucks, nobody’s going to sign up. So we’d better have a really great platform.

Because engagement and enrollment continues to grow over time, the product becomes stickier and stickier and more valuable to HR. We have enrollment rates, or engagement rates, that are 30%, 40%, 50% for some clients…That is a very different dynamic than a traditional SaaS or software business. You get that flywheel spinning that amplifies the business even more.

What led you to join Wellhub as CFO?

A traditional SaaS business has a very predictable kind of momentum, and your ability to have an impact is relatively small. And what I felt here is we were growing 100%, like just massive growth numbers, so I felt like, “Hey, this feels more like a rocket ship, where I can have a much bigger impact and help professionalize how we talk about the business, and bring some of the B2B, SaaS kind of metrics to investors, to show this is a high-value compounding story, not just your traditional benefit company.

And it doesn’t hurt that every day, people using our product are genuinely better off…This is a net positive to society. So it makes me really excited to come to work every day.

What does wellness look like for you personally?

I’m not a gym person. I’m not a traditional strength training person. I love yoga, so I do online yoga classes with some of our apps…I love HIIT training at home because it’s good to do some cardio. And I love pickleball.

What would be your best piece of advice for a fellow CFO of a high growth company?

The cliché answer is build a great team. Because nothing works without a team…There are some roles you need real technical people for, but in the end, I would always bet on what I would call the athlete, somebody who is curious…And then people that can stretch, that can learn things, that are going to stretch with the business. Because if you’re growing 30%, 40%, 50% year over year, for many years, if you’re not evolving yourself 40%, let’s say, every year, you’re falling behind the business.