Built from the ground, up
Core Direction didn’t start as a company. It started as a community — outdoor sessions, running crews, and the slow, personal work of getting humans to show up for each other.
In 2008, founder Cliff Tindell — a former competitive athlete with more than 25 years in fitness and wellness — began building grassroots fitness communities in Dubai. No app. No platform. Just people, movement and belonging.
What those years taught us became our founding conviction: wellness is not an individual pursuit — it is a community phenomenon. People move when they belong. They sustain change when they share it.
In 2015 we began building technology to scale what already worked between people: a platform for communities, challenges and events, and later an AI intelligence layer — the AI Core Coach, AI Personal Trainer and AI Body Scanner — that gives every member programme-quality coaching.
Today, Core Direction operates as two arms under CORE DIRECTION HOLDINGS: the technology arm you’re reading about here, and CORE EXPERIENCES, the events agency behind the COREUNITY Festival, the AlUla Wellness Festival, Expo 2020 wellness programming and city-scale public health campaigns.
The numbers tell part of the story — 100,000+ members across 117 countries, 24 billion+ steps, 1,000+ communities, partnerships with the Dubai Health Authority, the Royal Commission for AlUla, Emirates, Marriott and Dubai Holding. But the real story is the same as it was in 2008: a community united and inspired by movement. We call it coreunity.