Tiger Shroff and family owns MMA league, training facility with 16 gyms across India: Ayesha and Krishna Shroff explain their business empire

Indian Express

6 hours ago

Almost all Bollywood celebrities diversify their portfolio and have multiple income sources, like businesses and real estate. Similarly, actor Tiger Shroff has invested in his own training facility called MMA Matrix and an MMA fighting league called Matrix Fight Night. However, he isn't the sole owner of these and shares the control with his mother, Ayesha Shroff, and sister, Krishna Shroff. In a recent interview, Ayesha talked about her own career as a film producer in Bollywood and how the family have overcome tough times to create an empire for themselves.
While talking to Zero1 Hustle, both mother and daughter shared the story behind the gym, and Krishna said, 'Our gym is basically a passion project that my mother, brother, and I came together for. There is no one better than Tiger to represent something like fitness; he is the epitome of it. I think a lot of tier-2 and 3 cities have shown him a lot of love, and some of his most loyal fans come from those places. Tiger was very keen to bring these facilities to them.' Ayesha added that the idea behind the Matrix gym was to create a premium space that combined several different aspects of fitness and martial arts.
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'No one really had what our gym possessed, at least in the city. Tiger already did martial arts, and Krishna was big on strength training. So we thought of building a space which combines both those disciplines. The name came from the film Matrix. There is no division, and everyone contributes equally to the venture, Tiger less in terms of time, because of his acting career. We put in our own money, and we weren't answerable to any investors. Today we have 16 gyms Pan-India, including our mothership here. Now we have involved some partners as well, and we choose between franchising or partnering up with someone, based on the kind of money they can put in,' said Ayesha.
Talking about the martial arts promotion company Matrix Fight Night, Ayesha took the viewers back to where the journey started for them and said, 'It all started when we attended an MMA show here in India, and Tiger was a part of the organisation that hosted it for some time as well. Krishna had been a fan of MMA for a long time, and she was also very familiar with a lot of Indian and international fighters, so that's her strong point. I take care of the organising aspect of it all, and my love for films and production translates here. Everything, down to the very last detail, goes through me.'
She explained the pay scale of their organisation and the business model and stated that they are on their way to competing with the biggest brands in the world of MMA. 'The ticketing thing doesn't work in India yet, because we still don't have the megastars to bring in those huge crowds. When we came into the space, the starting salary for an Indian fighter was $200 (Rs 17k), and now a debut fighter gets paid $2000 (Rs 1.74 lakh). If you are fighting for a title, you get paid $10k (Rs 8.7 lakh). So if you compare our pay scale with a lot of other promotions globally, we are still pretty good. The idea is to make this into a proper salaried profession for all these fighters. We are currently on JioHotstar, and we literally bullied them for that platform. They didn't expect the numbers we got, and then they came back to us all excited and even came to watch a show.'
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Krishna added and said, 'We are in the process of changing the whole revenue model, because a lot of these fighters didn't have any kind of recognition before MFN, and now they have massive followings in their hometowns and villages.' MFN has been active since 2019, and they have had 17 shows to date.