Running is the cheapest sport on Earth: All you need is a pair of shoes, some shorts and an old T-shirt, right?
Not if VCs have anything to say about it.
More venture capital than ever is pumping into the running industry, from energy gels to carbon-plated shoes. A boom in popularity for the sport and amateur athletes’ newfound obsession with tracking their health metrics has blown open a once-niche market.
“It’s the natural progression of people leaning on technology to optimize and push performance,” said Florian Wojewodzki, a consumer investor at IRIS Ventures. “With wearables, with nutrition, with gear, everyone’s pushing the boundaries to get that extra inch.”
At the same time, a buzzy deal boosted confidence in the industry’s exit potential. In April, Strava, a sports tracking app that has become a mainstay of the global running community, acquired personalized coaching startup Runna.
Overnight, Runna, a small startup born in London with less than $10 million in venture capital funding, had access to Strava’s distribution of 150 million athletes.
“It proved the point that we wobbled over,” said Jon Wright, partner at JamJar Investments, a consumer-focused VC firm. Wright, who led Runna’s Series A, had passed on the app a year prior for fear that the market opportunity was too small.
Strava, part fitness tracker and part social media, is itself eyeing an IPO as early as next year, the Financial Times reported in October, promising a long-awaited payout for investors like Sequoia and TCV.
It’s also a leading brand in the expanding running economy: Just running shoes and apparel alone are valued at over $90 billion today, and growing, according to Mordor Intelligence.
In this new age of the fitness-optimized, there’s also: Satisfy, a British athletic apparel brand with a rock ‘n’ roll edge; Maurten, a hydrogel company partnered with Ironman; and Endorphins, a personalized training app provider that also organizes run clubs in major US cities.
Going the extra mile
Many up-and-coming brands flooded the airwaves during the week of the 2025 NYC Marathon. Over 59,000 runners crossed the finish line, up 4,000 since last year. The odds of securing a bib in the marathon’s annual lottery have dropped to around 3%.
Across the country, run clubs have been popping up, promising human connection, a potential alternative to dating apps and, for one club running along Manhattan’s west side, an opportunity to pitch your startup. In finance and tech circles, running marathons or ultras has become yet another status symbol that they’re willing to shell out cash for.
“People find ways to go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to run, but how do I make this fancier or attach status to it?’ ” said Marc Cohen, an early investor in Runna who runs a solo GP firm, unbundled vc.
What’s perhaps most surprising is that, despite a long deal slump in the consumer sector, VCs are investing in the space anyway. After all, selling running gear is far from the high-margin formula that typically draws VCs.
Some startups have developed brand halos to keep customers around—both Maurten and Bandit market their products with sleek, black-and-white visuals.
Maurten, which holds over 100 patents for sports nutrition products, advertises its endorsements from prominent athletes and official partnerships with endurance races. Bandit, an apparel brand founded by a member of a local Brooklyn run club, appeals to New Yorkers’ desires for both hometown charm and being part of an exclusive club.
Others have gone even further: Kotcha, a startup out of Paris, launched with long-distance running legend Eliud Kipchoge as a co-founder and equity shareholder. Kotcha, a personalized running coach and competitor of Runna, trained an LLM with training plans from Kipchoge’s team in Kenya.
The proof of the model will be in how long runners stick around. In apparel and CPG, the promise of a loyal customer base can offset the high upfront costs.
Still, if a company gambles on a fading fad, the blowback can be pricy: Take Peloton, the stationary bike company whose stock price is down 96% from its peak.
And running is a notoriously crowded space. Huge legacy players like Nike, HOKA and Asics are competing with upstarts with much greater access to capital.
For higher-margin digital apps, where downloading is cheap and unsubscribing is easy, keeping users engaged is much trickier.
“I think it’s going to start getting more and more competitive and expensive to acquire those new customers,” Wojewodzki said. “Particularly when you have the Stravas of the world buying the apps that have not only the best-in-class product, but a sticky community behind it.”
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