When the sports social network Strava announced that it would be buying coaching app Runna, it had one peculiar assurance for customers: nothing obvious and immediate would change. The apps will stay separate “for the foreseeable future” and while the deal will bring new investment and hopefully growth for Runna, it won’t bring upheaval.
It’s a point that Michael Martin, Strava’s chief executive, reiterates in an interview with The Independent just hours after the deal is announced. He is “committed” for the Runna team to keep running the company as an “independent proposition”, he says. They will be “separate but complementary”, he says.
It is odd to need to reassure your users that the latest big announcement won’t make much of a difference at all. But it is a reflection of where the tech and particularly sports tech industry is these days: users’ minds leap not to the integrations and innovations that might be brought by a new deal, but by the fear that prices will soar and features will be switched off.
The sports tech market is littered with companies that were acquired and then stripped of their assets by their new owners, or shut down entirely so that they are no longer available. Strava itself has had exactly that problem in the past: late last year, it completed its acquisition of mapping platform FATMAP, and announced it would be shutting down.
Martin is aware that track record – which comes from a time before he took over the company, at the end of 2023 – has left people worried. Strava didn’t do a good job of explaining that it bought the company for its “amazing and proprietary mapping technology” but that it wasn’t acquired to be a standalone business, and wouldn’t have been viable as one, he said. That’s in contrast to Runna, he says, which is intended to stay separate and is already profitable as an independent company.
Martin also accepts another important concern of users, about what the deal could mean for their favourite training apps and their access to data. Last year, Strava announced changes to the rules for its API that allows developers to access exercise data, immediately leading to panic that the vast universe of training apps that use Strava as a training log would stop working.
Part of those changes come from financial necessity, he says, noting that many companies have restricted access to their API as the number of developers trying to use them – in part because of AI – has increased. For Strava to allow its data to stay accessible, it has to “protect it”, he says, which means monitoring the developers that are using it and ensuring they are not abusing that access. That’s what was supposed to be happening last year, he says.
“Candidly, I don’t think we did a great job of communicating that,” he says. “I take accountability for that, and I have learned from that.”
Runna began as one of those developers among the 200,000 that write to the Strava platform, integrating with the social network so that people could post the workouts they did using its coaching tools to their friends. Quickly, Runna realised that was not only a useful integration for users, but also a way of promoting the app, and it helped registrations soar.
The newly announced acquisition, which has been in the work for nine months or so, grew from a similar place. Runna was invited to Camp Strava, the company’s annual summit for developers as well as athletes and others. Dom Maskell, one of its founders, tried relentlessly to find the contact details of Michael Martin, and tried every variation of the company’s email he could find. Eventually, he found his way to another Michael – Horvath, one of its co-founders – who put Runna in touch with the CEO and began the acquisition.
But Ben Parker, Runna’s co-founder and head coach, is similarly committed that the acquisition will not mean any huge changes of direction. Every decision at Runna is “guided by what is best for our runners”, he says; “as a result, we make a service that makes people happy and makes people healthier, and that’s why they tell their friends about it, and that’s why it’s grown”. That growth might just be a little quicker now, given the extra investment from Strava.
