Fitness app Strava keeps building brand business ahead of IPO

At 7 am on Oct. 6, before the first panel of Advertising Week New York, the conference schedule listed a run. The host was fitness-tracking app Strava. The runners it wanted were the people who decide where advertising budgets go: media buyers, agency planners and brand marketers.

It wasn’t a one-off. Strava’s brand unit, Strava for Business, had led a morning run at Advertising Week Europe in London in March and turned up as a partner at Cannes Lions, the ad industry’s main festival, in June. It had hosted the same New York run a year earlier, in October 2025.

Two years earlier, the company’s Chief Executive had said something that sits awkwardly next to those runs. “Just to be direct, I’m not looking to make Strava an advertising product,” Michael Martin told TechCrunch in July 2024. Subscription, he said, was the right model.

On paper, there’s no contradiction. Strava doesn’t sell ads. It sells brands a place inside the workout, and in 2026 it stepped up the search for buyers.

A crowd that mostly doesn’t pay

Strava now says it has 200 million registered users in 185 countries. Founded in San Francisco in 2009, it is still private, though perhaps not for long: on Feb. 2 it confirmed a confidential draft registration with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Most of Strava’s users pay nothing. Yet estimates put the company’s 2025 earnings at between $415 million (€371m) in revenue and $490 million (€438m) in annual recurring revenue, according to Business of Apps and research firm Sacra. Strava doesn’t publish a breakdown. Sacra estimated in December 2023 that 90 percent of revenue came from premium subscriptions, with sponsored challenges making up most of the rest. 

Strava has promised not to earn from its free users by selling their data or filling their feed with ads. Around 2020 it removed sponsored posts from the feed and moved features behind its paywall.

Any investor reading the eventual S-1 will ask what that free audience is worth. Strava for Business is the company’s second answer, after converting free users into paying ones: a revenue line that earns from people who stay free without breaking the pledge.

Strava’s Year in Sport 2025 report shows the math behind it. In the 12 months to August 2025, the company reported the following club growth, a shift it presented as Gen Z choosing group runs over scrolling:

• new clubs: nearly four times as many,
• total clubs: one million,
• running clubs: up 3.5 times,
• hiking clubs: up 5.8 times.

Strava’s numbers describe what sporting goods brands already pay for through race sponsorships, store run clubs and ambassador programs: people who turn up in person, every week. For those brands, Strava is one more channel to reach them.

How a badge became a business

Brands found Strava before Strava went looking for brands. Since 2011 cyclists have logged Rapha’s Festive 500 on the app, a challenge set by the British cycling apparel brand to ride 500 km between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. In 2023, 262,890 riders took part, according to German cycling magazine Bike.

The formula was simple. A brand sets a goal, the athlete earns a badge and sometimes a reward. It became the heart of what Strava sells to brands. For years, though, the company did little to sell it.

That changed in 2023. Its paid-media agency, Bind Media, says Strava ran only a handful of business-to-business campaigns in late 2022 and early 2023, with almost no measurable effect on its sales pipeline.

Strava hired Bind in July 2023 with a basic brief: get media buyers to see Strava as a marketing channel at all. From mid-2024 the goal became deals it could attribute, with spending on LinkedIn, Google and Meta raised month by month and a separate test in the DACH region. The campaign ran like any B2B sales funnel. Bind says it aimed at two groups at once: staff at marketing agencies, who could recommend Strava to their clients, and a list of brands approached directly.

Its ad accounts were linked to Strava’s customer database, so prospects saw different messages as they moved toward a deal. A brand film made with creative agency Something Familiar has run on paid channels worldwide and, according to Bind, was the unit’s first “Sponsored TV” ad on LinkedIn. Strava has also paid for sponsored articles in Adweek and Marketing Brew.

There is an irony in it. To sell inventory that can’t be bought automatically, Strava buys ads on the industry’s biggest automated, auction-based platforms.

The leadership changed too. Martin, a former YouTube executive, took over as Chief Executive in January 2024. Chief Financial Officer Matt Anderson joined in August 2025, and Barry McCarthy, former Chief Financial Officer of Netflix and Spotify, took a board seat in January. It’s a team built for a listing.

By 2026 the brand unit was behaving like a company preparing to scale. It was hiring sales leaders in North America, Europe and APAC, had launched versions of its website in Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish and had put the marketing-industry event circuit on its calendar. In July it launched a loyalty integration with Adidas in the US and Canada.

Strava for Business is run largely from London. Strava Limited, the UK subsidiary, grew its lease commitments from £4,000 (€4,700) to £219,381 (€258,900) in 2024, according to its accounts, and Evelina Jarbin, Senior Director of Strava for Business, joined its board in June 2025.

At Advertising Week New York, Jen Starr, North America Director at Strava for Business, shared a stage with Jessica Padula, Vice President of Marketing at Nespresso USA. The session was called “How to win the NYC Marathon (for your brand).”

Selling motivation, not screen time

The model starts with a number Strava likes to quote: subscribers spend about an hour being active for every two minutes in the app. Two minutes leaves little room for display ads. So Strava sells the hour.

● Sponsored challenges. A brand sets a goal (a distance, a climb, a streak of active days) and a reward, such as a discount or a prize. Strava promotes it through its challenge gallery, emails and in-feed alerts, and every athlete who joins shows up in followers’ feeds. Strava doesn’t publish prices on its challenges page. Modern Retail reported in 2024 that challenges started at $20,000 (€17,900), citing Strava’s guide for partners.

●  Sponsored segments. The same idea, applied to the map. A brand takes over a stretch of road or trail, often a race course. Strava steers smaller brands toward free Strava Clubs instead.

●  Subscriptions sold in bulk. The third product line has nothing to do with media. Employers, insurers, loyalty programs and schools can buy Strava subscriptions in bulk, self-service up to 250 codes and through a Client Partner above that. 

The Adidas deal closes a loop: adiClub members earn points for logged workouts and can spend them on a Strava subscription.

No machines in the middle. Strava doesn’t sell through ad exchanges or demand-side platforms, the software agencies use to buy ads automatically, and it doesn’t support third-party cookie retargeting. Every deal goes through a salesperson. That keeps prices in Strava’s hands. It also explains the hiring: this business grows with the sales team, not with software.

What stays hidden is almost everything an investor would want to see. Strava doesn’t disclose (yet) the number of brand partners, average deal size or renewal rates. And because bulk subscriptions sit in the same unit, even a future revenue breakdown may not separate brand media from subscription sales.

What the numbers can and can’t show

Strava has never published financial statements, and no public S-1 has appeared on the SEC’s EDGAR database. Apart from one company statement on ARR, every revenue figure below is an estimate or a press report. None separates brand revenue from subscriptions.

Strava’s own statement is about annual recurring revenue (ARR), not booked revenue: in August 2025 it said ARR was approaching $500 million (€447m). Public data can’t put a size on the brand business.

The only evidence of momentum comes from Strava’s own agency. Bind Media reports that pipeline deal value rose 427 percent and return on its B2B ad spend 15 percent between 2024 and 2025. Those figures measure deals in negotiation, not revenue booked, and they come from a firm with every reason to publish them.

A feed worth fighting over

How much Strava’s feed is worth became clear in 2025, in a dispute with Garmin. On Sept. 30 that year, Strava sued the watchmaker in a US federal court in Colorado, alleging that Garmin had infringed its patents on segments and heatmap-based routing and breached a 2015 cooperation agreement that brought Strava Live Segments to Garmin devices. Garmin declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Strava’s public explanation was about something else. Chief Product Officer Matt Salazar said on Reddit that new Garmin developer guidelines, issued July 1, required Garmin’s logo on every activity built from its data, which he called “blatant advertising.” Some industry observers read the guidelines as asking for attribution rather than a mandatory logo.

Within two weeks Strava said it would credit every device brand in the same way. On Oct. 21 it withdrew the case without prejudice, leaving open the option to refile. The episode cuts both ways. Strava guards its feed against brands that won’t pay for it.

But its brand business depends on data it doesn’t fully generate, since much of what users log comes from watches made by companies that can set terms. Around the same time, Garmin announced an integration with rival route app Komoot, owned since March 2025 by Italy’s Bending Spoons.

For sporting goods brands, Strava is both supplier and gatekeeper. Adidas, Hoka, Rapha and others run challenges or integrations inside an app that now owns the coaching apps Runna and The Breakaway. The brands buy access. Strava keeps the relationship and the activity data.

Sporting goods brands no longer have the inventory to themselves. Mars runs a yearlong partnership for its Iams pet food brand, whose January challenge to log a 5K with a dog drew more than 91,000 participants. Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic, L’Oréal and Dove Men+Care have run activations too, so endurance brands now bid against coffee, pet food, airline and grooming budgets.

For brands, Strava’s appeal is the quality of the audience rather than its size. Its users record activity rather than just scroll past content, and they engage with each other: Strava counted 14 billion kudos in 2025, 20 percent more than a year earlier. In Europe, that channel is sold by a London-based team covering the UK and the continent.

What the IPO filing will have to answer

How big is the brand business? Strava has never disclosed brand revenue, partner numbers or deal sizes. A public S-1 would settle this in one document, but the spring listing window has passed and Strava has set no date.

Will the feed stay brand-free? Martin’s pledge rules out an advertising product, and Strava tells brands it is “ad free” but “not brand free.” Public shareholders will ask how much more the free audience can earn. In-feed alerts for sponsored challenges already exist; how far they go is open.

Can a sales-led model scale? Without automated buying, growth depends on hiring Client Partners market by market. That works for premium deals with endurance brands. It limits how many smaller brands Strava can serve.

Who controls the data? Strava’s pitch rests on recorded activity. In 2025, 72 percent of users recorded activities on their phones, according to Strava, which reduces its dependence on device makers. But many users also record with watches from partners such as Garmin, which has shown it can set conditions.

Conversion or brands? Strava’s main answer to its free audience is conversion, not branded partnerships. In July 2025 it launched a Strava + Runna bundle at $149.99 (€134) a year, close to double the $79.99 (€71) price of a Strava subscription alone. Runna, which Strava bought in April 2025, sells no brand media of its own: its race and brand partnerships exist to win subscribers.

The morning runs in London, Cannes and New York were sales calls in running shoes. The S-1, whenever it becomes public, will show how many of them closed. If it reports brand and partnership revenue as a separate line, SGIE will replace the estimates in this case study with reported figures. And maybe with a new case study.

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