Our founder story.

I started doing Judo when I was 18 at my university. I had decided to take a gap semester in Korea before I graduated and followed my older cousin to a Brazilian Jiu‑Jitsu gym. I’ve never been beaten so badly at something, and that is when I knew BJJ was the right art for me. After I graduated I gave up on my investment banking job, much to the ire of my parents, and started training BJJ full-time. Things were going great, but I had an itch to use my brain in a different way and started taking programming classes at Columbia University. Mithly ended up being the perfect marriage of my programming and BJJ skills.

When I was first exposed to the software at our gym, I was horrified. It looked like it was coded in the 1990s, and I knew something had to change. Something had to be built with the BJJ academy in mind, not just generic gym software. More importantly, gyms are important third spaces for their communities. That shaped my philosophy when it came to building Mithly: it had to be as easy to use as possible, from payments to lead management.