Under Armour has sold MapMyFitness to the media company Outside.
As it turns out, Outside’s CEO, Robin Thurston, is also co-founder of the acquired company. The other co-founder is Kevin Callahan, Outside’s Vice President of Product. And they founded in addition MapMyRide, MapMyRun and MapMyHike, all of which Outside is acquiring.
Outside says that MapMyFitness has more than 80 million registered users and that its acquisition will make the media company “the world’s largest advertising network in the outdoor and active lifestyle industry.”
As Thurston explains in an interview with Alejandro Cremades, the idea was to produce less of a guide or an atlas than a route-planner. Back in the day he was working with an early version of the Google Maps API and one night at dinner someone said, “It would be cool if I knew the roads that you know here in Switzerland without your being here.” He and Callahan, an engineer, put that idea together with Maps. Revenues had reached $3 million by 2009 and $20 million by 2013, when CEO Kevin Plank called from Under Armour – and acquired the company 90 days later, for $150 million.
It’s “a little surreal,” Thurston tells Axios, to reacquire the company.
According to Outside’s press release, the deal closed on Aug. 30 and its terms will not be disclosed. Nor has Outside estimated its own valuation in public. In the interview, however, Thurston says that Outside has raised “a little bit over $180 million” in capital to date. According to Axios, it underwent two rounds of funding in 2021: a series B round worth $150 million, when Pocket Outdoor Media acquired Outside magazine and renamed itself Outside, and a series C round worth $157 million, with such new investors as Madrone Capital Partners, QIC and Wellcome Trust.
