The short version
Arnav moved to Chicago from India in 2009 to study at the University of Chicago. There he met Shivani Jain and Ryota Sekine — two future co-founders who, like him, had no engineering background and no venture funding lined up. What they had was a simple observation: office life is sedentary, and nobody had built a good enough reason to fix that from under a desk.
That observation became Cubii, a compact seated elliptical first funded through a 2014 Kickstarter campaign. With almost no outside capital, the team grew it into one of Inc.'s fastest-growing private companies in America for consecutive years, reaching tens of millions in annual revenue before Gridiron Capital acquired a controlling stake in October 2020 in a deal reported at roughly $100 million.
"We get calls from people saying Cubii has literally changed their lives. That is the most heartwarming thing you can imagine." — on unexpected customers rehabbing from surgery, cancer treatment, and arthritis
Arnav has since stepped back from Cubii's day-to-day and started Tovie, along with speaking openly about the cost of the hustle-first culture that built his first company — and what he's doing differently the second time around.