Founder & CEO

Urban Athletes

Verawaty Budiyanto

Starting from a love for the world of fitness and nutrition, Verawaty Budiyanto is a Bachelor of Architecture at Petra Christian University. She left her profession as a contractor and interior designer in 2004 to join Celebrity Fitness at Supermall Pakuwon Indah Surabaya as a team pioneer to conduct the first Celebrity Fitness pre-sale membership. Within 3 years of joining Celebrity Fitness, Verawaty’s career has grown rapidly to become Top Producer of the Years and Verawaty has successfully led the sales team to open Celebrity Fitness Tunjungan Plaza in 2006 and prepared the team for the opening of Celebrity Fitness Galaxy Mall in 2007.

After ending her career at Celebrity Fitness, Verawaty helped entrepreneurs to create operating systems for various companies (especially Gyms and Spas) as a Management Consultant for 6 years, while working as General Manager of Clark Hatch Internusa. In 2015 Verawaty received an offer to have a career as District Business Manager at Gold’s Gym Indonesia for 2 years. There she was responsible for all of Gold’s Gym business units outside Jakarta such as: Surabaya, Bandung, Medan and Makassar, both in terms of Operations, Sales, PT, Marketing, Human Resources, Recruiting & Training.

Realizing her role as a housewife, having a job that requires traveling to 5 different cities every month makes her role as a mother not optimal. Therefore, he decided to quit and start his own fitness brand at the end of 2016 under the name Urban Fitness and Studio which was then rebranded in 2017 to become Urban Athletes. Until now, Urban Athletes has 4 branches in Surabaya and 1 branch in Gresik.

Urban Athletes was founded with the tagline ‘International standard local gym’ to show Verawaty’s love for the motherland. During her 17-year career in the gym world with international service standards, Verawaty has colleagues from various countries and nationalities. He also realized that the quality of the work of the Indonesian people is no less good than those of foreigners, as long as we can provide the right direction and training. Therefore, he was very interested in Neuro Linguistic Programming which really helped him in leading a company whose staff was dominated by well-built men alone. His dream is to make Urban Athletes a gym that was founded and managed by the first nation’s children who can compete and even excel compared to gyms managed or founded by foreigners.

With extensive insight and network, Verawaty is respected in the Indonesian fitness world. This makes him the main initiator and co-founder of the Indonesian Fitness Entrepreneurs Association (PPKI) along with other major fitness brands in Indonesia.