About Gymdesk
The software should disappear. Your gym should run.
Gymdesk is gym management software built by people who have taught classes, chased down payments, and lost their Sundays to a spreadsheet. Today it runs the billing, scheduling, and member management for 4,500 gyms, studios, and academies in 34 countries. Smoothcomp, the platform behind the sport's largest competitions, is part of Gymdesk.
About Gymdesk
Why we build what we build
To take everything off a gym owner's plate that isn't teaching, so the people who build strong members and strong communities can spend their time doing exactly that.
About Gymdesk
One kind of business, many disciplines
Gymdesk started in martial arts, because that is where our founder saw the problem first. The problem turned out not to be a martial arts problem. Any owner-operator running a membership business is fighting the same fight: too much admin, not enough time on the floor. That is who we build for, whatever is being taught in the room.
By the numbers
Where we are today
2016
4,500
34
2015
~2M
~7,000
65,000
5,850
Our story
Two companies that were solving the same problem from opposite ends
Neither of us set out to build a software company. Both of us built software because the thing we cared about was being run on paper.
Smoothcomp
2000 · Sweden
The founders start running events
Long before there was any software, Ricard Carneborn and Martin Janson were organizing competitions in Sweden. Ricard had been on the national team for a decade and was running the Nordic Open; Martin was building the Swedish Open into one of Northern Europe’s largest tournaments. Fifteen years of doing it the hard way is what the product eventually came from.
Smoothcomp
2015 · Sweden
Smoothcomp is founded
Ricard, Martin Janson and Martin Varghult sat down to build a better registration system for their own events. They realized within that first conversation that the problem was bigger than their events, and built it as a product for every organizer instead.
Gymdesk
2016 · United States
Martial Arts on Rails is founded
A Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt with an engineering background got tired of watching great instructors lose their evenings to billing, so he built software for the schools he trained at. The name said exactly who it was for. He kept a full-time job for the first three years and built it nights and weekends, with no outside funding and no sales team.
Smoothcomp
2018 onward
Beyond grappling
What started in jiu-jitsu spread into judo, wrestling, karate, taekwondo and MMA. Non-grappling events grew from a small fraction of the platform to roughly a fifth of everything run on it, and federations across Europe, the Americas and Asia moved their rankings onto it.
Gymdesk
1 January 2022
Martial Arts on Rails becomes Gymdesk
The name had stopped describing the customers. Running a martial arts school turned out to be much the same job as running a fitness gym, a gymnastics club or a yoga studio, and those owners were already signing up. The new name made room for them. Today there are customers in 34 countries.
Gymdesk
2025
Gymdesk Originals
A documentary series about gym owners, hosted by CEO Alex Cuevas and filmed on their floors rather than in a studio. Less a marketing channel than an excuse to sit down with the people the software is built for and ask how they actually run their businesses.
Gymdesk
Early 2026
Gymdesk Payments
Processing brought in-house, so billing stopped being something owners had to assemble from three separate vendors. One system for memberships, charges and payouts, with the money side finally sitting where the member records already were.
October 2026
Smoothcomp joins Gymdesk
Two companies that had been solving the same problem from opposite ends became one. For the academies that compete, rosters, results and competition history now live alongside the daily work of running the school. For everyone else, the rest of the platform keeps doing exactly what it always did.
How the company fits together
Two products, one company
Gymdesk and Smoothcomp keep their own names and their own teams. Most gyms use one of them. The academies that compete use both, and that is where they connect.
Running the business
The software a gym opens every day, whatever it teaches.
- Members, billing and payments
- Scheduling, booking and check-in
- Marketing, leads and retention
- Reporting across one or many locations
Running the competition
The platform behind registrations, brackets and results, for the gyms and federations that compete.
- Event registration and brackets
- Weigh-ins, scoring and live results
- Rankings, federations and affiliations
- Athlete profiles and competition history
Leadership
Alex Cuevas, CEO
Alex leads Gymdesk the way he trains: white belt mentality, show up, keep learning. He taught taekwondo before he ran software companies, holds a black belt in it, and still trains Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Judo. He came to Gymdesk after executive roles at GoSite, Planet DDS, Legwork, Kaseya, and Yodle.
He is also the person on camera. Alex hosts Gymdesk Originals, our documentary series about gym owners, which has taken him from academies across the United States to Peru, sitting down with the people our software is built for and asking how they actually run their businesses.
Gymdesk Originals
Long-form conversations with gym owners about what actually works, filmed on their floors rather than in a studio. Pull two or three episode stills in here.
The leadership team
The people behind the product
Working alongside Alex. Each of them owns a piece of what you experience as Gymdesk, so if something in the product, the billing or the support is working, one of these people is accountable for it.
The Smoothcomp founders
Three black belts, one tournament problem
Smoothcomp was not built by software people who found a market. It was built by competitors and event organizers who could not find software that worked, and who have between them roughly seventy years on the mat. All three still run academies and organize events.
Where we are
No headquarters. A team spread across the globe.
Gymdesk started in Austin and has been remote ever since. Today our team works from four continents, and Smoothcomp works from Sweden. That is not a perk we are bragging about. It is why someone is awake and answering when a gym owner has a problem, whatever time it is where they are.
North America
Latin America
Europe and Israel
Asia-Pacific
In their words
The people who actually use it
Everything above is us describing ourselves. This is the part that counts: owners who moved off paper, spreadsheets or a competitor, and what changed once they did.
Come see for yourself
Your job is teaching.
Ours is everything else.
Thirty-day free trial. No credit card, no sales call, no demo required. See whether it solves your problem, the same way our first thousand customers did.