Climbing District Changes Leadership Amid Financial Strain
Starting October 3, 2026, Pléiade Venture director Julien Watry and Clément Lorin will take over the day-to-day management of Climbing District. The leadership change comes after the company doubled in size in a single year, just as France’s climbing gym market is slowing and the group’s finances are coming under increasing pressure.
A new chapter is beginning at Climbing District. According to several sources who spoke with Vertige Media, the co-founders of the company, which was launched in 2019, will no longer be running operations as of October 3. They will remain shareholders and continue to be involved in strategic discussions, but they will no longer manage the business day to day.
The new structure also signals a more direct role for Pléiade Venture, one of the group’s major investors. Already represented on Climbing District’s supervisory board, the fund is now putting one of its own directors in charge of operations.
The co-founders declined to comment on the transition. Julien Watry also declined to discuss the change or the new leadership team’s mandate. He said he wanted to devote his time “to all of the teams” and indicated that he may speak publicly at a later date.
Market Forces
For the climbing gym chain, the leadership change follows two years of rapid expansion.
At the end of 2023, Climbing District raised €10 million from Pléiade Venture and longtime investor 123 Investment Managers, with a clear goal: speed up growth in France and expand across Europe. In 2024, the company acquired UrbanWall in Milan, followed by four gyms in London, including locations operated by Stronghold and The Arch. By early 2025, Climbing District said it had 11 gyms across three countries and had doubled in size in a single year. At the time, its executives said the gyms already in operation were profitable on a day-to-day basis. The money raised was therefore intended primarily to fund growth. Climbing District was part of a broader wave sweeping through the indoor climbing industry: more gym openings, new investors entering the market, acquisitions, and the rise of larger chains.
In 2025, Climbing District SAS posted a €3.05 million loss, up from €1.70 million the previous year. At the same time, the amount it still owed creditors rose from €5.63 million at the end of 2023 to €14.2 million at the end of 2025.
Since then, market conditions have deteriorated significantly. In late July, the holding company Climb Up Investissements and several of its operating subsidiaries entered court-supervised restructuring proceedings after months of declining attendance at some of the chain’s longstanding gyms. The company had already gone through several leadership changes. François Charpy, the former Quick and Disneyland Paris executive hired in 2025 to transform the business, stepped down as CEO a little over a year after taking the job. Jean-Luc Croset, who also came from the retail industry, replaced him in late June, just weeks before the restructuring proceedings began. Elsewhere in the industry, Vertical’Art closed its Lyon gym in 2025, an Arkose gym in Lille also shut down, and the Climbing Mulhouse Center closed more recently.
So far, no insolvency proceedings or gym closures have been announced within Climbing District itself. But the financial statements of its central company show mounting pressure.
There is an important caveat when reading those numbers: not all of the company’s French gyms are housed within the same legal entity. Climbing District SAS sits at the top of the group and directly operates the Batignolles gym, while several other locations are run through separate operating companies. Its financial statements therefore do not reflect the results of the entire network. In 2025, Climbing District SAS posted a €3.05 million loss, up from €1.70 million the previous year. At the same time, the amount it still owed creditors rose from €5.63 million at the end of 2023 to €14.2 million at the end of 2025.
It is against this backdrop that Pléiade Venture is becoming more directly involved in Climbing District.
That does not necessarily mean the gyms themselves are losing money. An individual gym can be profitable in its day-to-day operations while the parent company absorbs the cost of corporate overhead, acquisitions, new openings, or interest on debt. The accounts of several subsidiaries are also confidential. Among the limited figures that are publicly available, however, the company operating the Pont-de-Neuilly gym ended 2025 with a net loss of €526,000. What the public filings do show is that Climbing District SAS is losing more money than it was two years ago while also carrying far more debt. The available data does not make it possible to determine how much of that deterioration comes from the gyms themselves, the cost of the company’s European expansion, or the group’s broader corporate structure.
A Different Kind of Investment
It is against this backdrop that Pléiade Venture is becoming more directly involved in Climbing District. The climbing gym chain is also a somewhat unusual company within the fund’s portfolio, which is more heavily weighted toward technology businesses such as Gatling, a web performance testing company; cloud provider Leviia; TestWe, which digitizes exams; and financial software company smartTrade Technologies. A climbing gym chain, with its leases, construction costs, staffing needs, and heavy capital expenditures, operates under very different constraints.
Pléiade says it takes an active role in supporting its portfolio companies and invests with a long-term approach. Even so, having one of its directors move from Climbing District’s supervisory board into the company’s operational leadership represents a significant increase in the fund’s involvement.
The question now is what exactly the new management team has been asked to do.
Could some gyms be closed or sold if they are deemed insufficiently profitable? Is cost-cutting part of the plan? Will spending at headquarters, on marketing, events, or international expansion be reconsidered? Could employees also be affected? Will the group need to raise additional capital to finance its next phase?
At this stage, Vertige Media has obtained no information that would answer those questions.
Two years after raising €10 million to accelerate its European expansion, Climbing District is entering a very different phase. After growing at breakneck speed, the group now has to absorb that growth and find its way back to a financially sustainable business model.
In short, it has a steep climb ahead.
