Yahoo Finance Fitness app Strava reaches 100 million users
Fitness app Strava has surpassed 100 million registered users worldwide as the pandemic sparked a surge in personal fitness tracking.
Athletes on the platform have now shared over 7 billion activities, 2.5 billion of which were posted in the past 18 months.
The UK has become the app’s biggest market outside the US, with 1 in 6 adults now registered.
Strava CEO Michael Horvath told the Standard: “People are active in the UK in a lot of different ways.”
“It’s the way sport is organised here – it’s something that you talk about. It’s pervasive in the culture.”
The app is most popular with runners and cyclists, but since the reopening of gyms, users have taken to tracking a range of fitness activities from yoga to weight training.
Since 2020, the tech firm has doubled its employee headcount to over 375 worldwide, and has plans to introduce storytelling and video posting functionality to the app in a bid to build a bespoke social media platform for athletes.
The announcement comes despite dwindling fortunes for the tech sector as the rapid growth of tech businesses during the pandemic starts to wane. In April, Netflix reported a 200,000 drop in subscribers, the first decline in a decade, while cycling tech business Peloton reported a 24% drop in sales in the first quarter of 2022. The NASDAQ-100 Technology Sector Index has fallen 31% since the beginning of 2022.
However, Horvath said he would not rule out an IPO for the business in the future.
“It’s a means to an end and it’s something we would consider at the right time,” he said.
“We’re building a business for the very long run.”
