Mark Wahlberg Takes On Longevity Startups With Affordable Municipal Gym Concept
Mark Wahlberg has founded companies and backed many others, but he says the gym he’s opening in December has him more excited than anything he’s done in his entire career. It also targets a corner of the market where venture capital keeps flowing: pricey, diagnostics-heavy wellness.
Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Thursday, the actor announced that the first Municipal Gym opens in December. The 32,000-square-foot club outside Las Vegas will offer blood work, epigenetic testing, recovery equipment, compression therapy, cold plunges, and a café serving protein muffins, among other amenities. Wahlberg is positioning it as the affordable alternative to longevity clubs that charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for much the same offerings.
It’s the second phase of a plan that was, in some ways, first conceived seven years ago with a casual sportswear line.
The clothing brand Municipal launched during COVID, which Wahlberg admits “was not a good idea.” (Clothing was a poor business to enter in 2020, with retailers from J.Crew to Brooks Brothers filing for bankruptcy.)
The brand grew out of what Wahlberg had observed as a celebrity fitness spokesperson. He’d done collaborations with various brands, and other companies kept approaching him to be their brand ambassador, but they all seemed to want the same thing, he said. “Everybody just kind of wanted to sell T-shirts and sneakers. And I was like, well, I want to kind of have a bigger impact on people’s lives as a whole.”
By that, he meant what people eat, what supplements they take, how they train, and how they recover. Clothing was just the start. “We figured, okay, we’ll start in the apparel space, and then we’ll build from there.” He says he only takes swings at “things that I’m very passionate about and things that are a direct extension of who I am.”
Even without a pandemic, clothing is a brutal business, as we pointed out, citing Lululemon’s repeated quality-control challenges in 2026. But Wahlberg didn’t seem fazed, talking instead about why the gym fits his vision. He thought it “always could be great for the brand” in part because it gives people a place to “actually feel and touch the clothes” before they buy. Besides, he continued, how people exercise is “another big part of people’s lives.”
Most in the space have been laser-focused on the high end. Fountain Life, the longevity company co-founded by Tony Robbins, raised $18 million last year to expand its centers for wealthy clients, and a full subscription runs $21,500 a year, according to reports. The Estate, a company co-founded by Robbins and hospitality executive Sam Nazarian, is still mapping out plans to charge $35,000 memberships to its wellness centers. Equinox is similarly taking names for a $36,000 longevity add-on that it plans to launch atop a traditional gym membership.
Wahlberg says Municipal aims for that same luxury tier but for a lot less. “We have a better price point than our competitors, and we’re going to get far more results,” he said. For $99, he said as an example, members will receive three rounds of blood work and an hour with a doctor to flag what they’re predisposed to. Supplements and hormone therapy are also “right there.”
When we asked whether the gyms double as storefronts for his other products (he owns a supplements brand), he said “kind of.” What he’s really building, he said, is a “health and wellness ecosystem” with “everything there, soup to nuts.”
via TechCrunch