Tomás started programming long before anyone called it a career path. He passed through personal projects and a handful of companies before 2012, when he sat down with two close friends, Gonzalo Amuchástegui and José Tedin, to start Amalgama. The three had bonded over sailing long before they bonded over code. There was no master plan. “We were three devs who wanted to build things that mattered to us, and work with people we admired”, Tomás says.
Wellness wasn’t a market bet; it was already his life. He trains every day, has run four marathons, and does cold water immersions every Saturday. “The wellness world is my world”, he says. When founders in that space started showing up with real problems to solve, the connection was immediate. “In 2012 it wasn’t obvious there was a business there, but we weren’t looking for the obvious business. We were looking for people with vision and interesting problems. Wellness, over time, turned out to have both in industrial quantities”.
Building for people, not just products
Over more than a decade, Amalgama built the products behind founders like the teams at OPEX, Swish, and Mine’d, each one leaving its own mark. “OPEX taught us that methodology is the product”, Tomás explains. “Digital is the vehicle, not the substance”. Swish showed him that simplicity is the most expensive thing to build: “getting to something that feels obvious means taking away, not adding”. And Mine’d, working in mental health, calibrated him for good, “every UX decision carries real weight on someone”.
If he has to pick one, it’s OPEX. “That’s where I understood a good digital product isn’t what replaces the coach. It’s what amplifies them”.
The Fitneur sat down with Tomás to talk about where fitness tech gets it wrong, building across two cities, and what Amalgama actually is.
— Fitness has spent years bringing in tech, with mixed results. What fails most, and where’s the real opportunity?
— The most common mistake is confusing digitizing operations with building experience. Good management software takes work off staff, but it doesn’t make a member fall in love. And a great app without a solid operational core underneath collapses in two weeks. The real opportunity is in the member’s experience layer: the app, the coaching, the content, the relationship with the body and the data. That’s where gyms and wellness brands can actually differentiate.
— The team splits between Brooklyn and Buenos Aires. How does that shape the culture and the products?
— We can’t afford informality without structure. When half the team isn’t in the same room, everything important has to be written down. Culturally, the mix gives us something we wouldn’t have alone: New York’s product and market sensitivity, with Buenos Aires’ technical depth and creativity under constraints.
— In one line, what is Amalgama?
— A digital product studio specialized in welltech. We design and build software for health, fitness, and wellness companies.
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