Franco Facioni Chief Technology Officer, FitXR

Company

FitXR is the leading immersive virtual reality workout platform with total body workouts designed by top fitness experts. Dedicated to making fitness more fun for everyone, it offers classes within six distinct workout studios – Box, Dance, HIIT, Sculpt, Combat and Slam – and has most recently been a key partner in bringing the world-renowned dance brand, Zumba, to virtual reality. The app contains a growing range of fitness studios, where members can choose from box workouts with world-class trainers like Olympian Nicola Adams, powerful HIIT workouts, and immersive Zumba dance classes.

Their mission is to create a movement for movement – to redefine fitness and prove that exercise can be fun, and for everyone. Their members are an equal mix of people who were already exercising 5+ times per week, along with people who were not exercising at all. They believe in a future where exercise everywhere – whether that is the gym, the park, or at home – is enhanced through engaging technology that extends your reality.

Founded in 2016 in the UK, FitXR has quickly become one of the top downloaded apps on the Meta Quest store. Having raised close to $30m from top investors such as Maveron, BoostVC and TriplePoint, the business has grown to 70+ employees across the US, UK, and Spain – all connected by the commitment to making it simpler and more enjoyable for people to get moving.

Search Background

Erevena worked with FitXR to identify an exceptional CTO to lead the engineering function to build a platform that will enable the business to become the #1 VR application globally. With a track record of success, sitting in the top 20 apps on Meta Quest and soon to be available on the Apple Vision Pro, the CTO will play a key role in setting the business up for future success and growth.  Reporting to the CEO & Founder, the CTO will partner with business leaders across the organisation to ensure FitXR delivers a robust and scalable platform.

Requirements

The ideal CTO for FitXR would be someone who had a passion for VR and fitness, someone who could combine experience in gaming / consumer technology and hyper growth – and could tie engineering goals to commercial goals. This person would ideally have been the engineering leader of a company before, have worked closely with founders and be close enough to the details to support and empower the engineering leaders whilst also being able to lead the technical strategy as the company continues to grow.  There were some unique challenges to the techstack that meant experience in using Unity would also have been preferable.

Result

Erevena conducted a global search prioritizing engineering leaders with experience in VR, gaming, subscription business models and fitness products. We wanted someone that ideally would be able to quickly establish the needs of the FitXR engineering team as well as the needs of the executive team and Board, and then drive the engineering strategy and roadmap to success. We introduced FitXR to Franco Facioni. Franco brought a unique combination of experience across hypergrowth in Latin America with Rappi, as well as his role leading engineering in Zenly (acquired by Snap). Outside of his professional experience he had also created some games and was passionate about the opportunities presented by VR in the fitness space.