A Brief History of GymPlus

Two people, one gym floor, one stubborn question

Every company origin story has a moment where two very different people happen to be curious about the same problem. For Indoor Informatics, that moment happened in Otaniemi, Espoo, inside Aalto University's startup community, through the Kiuas Accelerator and Startup Sauna.

Aki Illikainen

CEO, co-founder

Aki Illikainen, the company's CEO, had spent time running a fitness club before co-founding Indoor Informatics, and had felt first-hand how much of the job was guesswork. Which machines actually got used? Was the new layout actually better, or did it just look better on paper? He knew the questions gym owners asked themselves every day, because he'd asked them himself.

Teemu Toivonen

CTO, co-founder

Teemu Toivonen, the company's CTO and co-founder, came at the same problem from the opposite direction: a genuine enthusiasm for, as he puts it, "teaching computers to see." Ordinary security cameras, he realized, already captured everything a gym owner would want to know. The technology just needed to learn how to watch and count.

Put those two instincts together, a founder who had lived the problem and a founder who could build the eyes to solve it, and you get the company's first working prototype: a security camera, a bit of computer vision, and a dashboard that could finally answer the question every gym owner had been asking for years.

From prototype to product: GymPlus takes shape

The earliest version of the idea wasn't a single product. It was three. Alongside what would become GymPlus, the team also built ParkPlus (parking and space occupancy) and ClassPlus (university and campus space utilization), all running on the same core computer-vision engine. Early pilots ran with Finnish partners including LUT University in Lappeenranta, and a handful of independent Finnish gyms willing to bet on two young founders and an unproven idea.

In 2019, the team took that idea abroad for the first time, presenting it at FIBO in Cologne, the world's largest fitness-industry trade fair, to operators and distributors from across Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. It was a small company's first real taste of a much bigger opportunity: the problem they were solving for Finnish gyms turned out to be universal.

What started as three products slowly consolidated around one: GymPlus. Rather than three thin tools, the team focused on building one platform deep enough to keep earning its place in a gym's daily operations: equipment and floor-space analytics first, with a great deal more still to come.

A small team, wearing a lot of hats

For years, Indoor Informatics stayed deliberately tiny, a handful of people doing an unreasonable number of jobs.

Miika Salminen

Applications

Miika Salminen joined in 2020 and quickly became one of those people who is impossible to categorize: he has worked on the company's content and design, on its product roadmap, and, as the company entered its current growth-financing round, on the financial and deal-structuring side of the business. That kind of range is typical of the earliest people to join a small, growing company.

As the product grew more sophisticated, so did the team behind it.

Olli Paananen

UX, UI & Brand

Olli Paananen brought a dedicated design and UX perspective to GymPlus for the first time, reshaping the product's day-to-day usability, from how gym staff manage their own team's access, to how new customers experience the platform for the very first time.

Selja Keränen

Data & AI

Selja Keränen joined the engineering side of the business and has since driven some of the platform's most ambitious internal projects, including work that pushed the product from simple usage tracking toward genuinely predictive, AI-assisted features.

Together, this stage of the company's history took GymPlus from a single-purpose monitoring tool to a genuine platform: equipment and floor-space analytics at its core, complemented by an AI-driven training and coaching layer, and a steadily more automated path for bringing a brand-new gym online, from the first camera going up on the wall to a fully configured, ready-to-use account.

Getting good at the unglamorous part: installing hundreds of cameras

A great product is only useful if it actually gets installed, configured and kept running at scale, without turning every new customer into a bespoke engineering project. This is where Seppo Jokinen and Heikki Puumalainen come in.

Seppo Jokinen

Sales, Finland

Seppo leads the company's sales effort in Finland, working directly with gym owners and chains to understand what they need before a single camera is shipped.

Heikki Puumalainen

Hardware

Heikki has taken on much of the unglamorous-but-essential work of field operations: coordinating hardware shipments, installation schedules and on-site setup across dozens of premises, so that what used to be a slow, hands-on rollout for each customer has become a repeatable, well-understood process the team can run at real scale.

Turning data into answers, not just numbers

The most recent chapter of the company's history has been about making all of that accumulated data actually useful, quickly and in plain language.

Stephanie Vaikonvaara

Customers

Stephanie Vaikonvaara works directly with customers to translate raw equipment-usage data into concrete recommendations: which machines are overcrowded, which are barely touched, and what a gym should realistically do about it.

To help her, and the rest of the team, keep pace with a fast-growing customer base, Indoor Informatics built an internal AI assistant that can answer detailed questions about any customer's equipment, usage and account status in seconds. The same period brought a genuinely new capability that customers had been asking about for years: a smarter way to flag likely unauthorized facility access, combining several independent signals so operators can act on real issues instead of chasing false alarms.

Taking GymPlus beyond Finland

Johannes Westergård

Sales, International

In 2026, the company took its clearest step yet toward becoming an international business, bringing on Johannes Westergård, based in Stockholm, to lead sales outside Finland. Johannes arrives with over fifteen years of commercial leadership behind him, including building European go-to-market strategy for an AI and facial-recognition company serving gym chains across the Nordics, DACH and Benelux, consulting on Nordic expansion for a security-solutions business, and, earlier still, heading sales and marketing for a European entry-control manufacturer.

Alongside Seppo's work in Finland, Johannes now leads the push into new markets, building on the international relationships the company first started forming back at that FIBO trade fair in Cologne.

Indoor Informatics today

Nearly a decade after its first camera went up over a gym floor in Otaniemi, Indoor Informatics remains a small, deliberately focused team with an outsized footprint in the facilities it serves.

Trusted by leading gyms

Nine people, two founders and seven colleagues who each joined because a specific, unglamorous piece of the puzzle needed solving, now support gyms and facilities across three countries, from independent, family-run clubs to well-known international fitness brands and university campuses.

A short history, and a much longer one still to be written

What began as two founders and a single camera above a gym floor has grown into a platform, a team, and a genuinely international business, built the same way it started: one honest conversation with one customer at a time.

The interesting part is that most of this story is still ahead of it. New markets, a fast-growing product, and a team that is only just getting started. If this is the kind of company you'd like to know more about, we'd love to tell you the rest.

What comes next: gyms that understand themselves

The next chapter is about closing the gap between knowing and doing. A gym already produces a continuous picture of itself: who comes in, which machines are busy, where the queues form, what members say afterwards. Once AI agents can read that picture the way an experienced manager reads a gym floor, they can start carrying the operational work rather than just reporting on it.

Some of that is already visible in what GymPlus does today, and the direction it points in is concrete:

The point is not to replace the people who run gyms. It is to give a small team the attention span of a much larger one, so the hours saved go back into members. That is the company we are building next, and it is a good moment to follow along, or to become part of the story.