Less than a month after it was reported that Strava was making serious progress towards becoming a public company, its CEO has strongly hinted that this is likely to happen in the not-too-distant future to open up new opportunities for the world’s foremost social fitness app, while falling short of providing specific details or a date.
> How to use Strava to make you fitter
In an interview with the Financial Times, Michael Martin said that a public listing on the stock exchange “provides easy access to capital in case we wanted to do more and bigger acquisitions”, saying that the company’s intention is to go public “at some point”.
As first reported by Reuters in September, Strava has already invited major banks including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to make pitches ahead of a potential IPO.
Since taking over from his predecessor and Strava co-founder Michael Horvath, Martin has prioritised growth and the number of paying subscribers, with the recent acquisition of would-be rival apps seemingly an effort to offer more value from the Strava Premium subscription.
> Is Strava still worth paying for?
After acquiring 3D mapping app Fatmap in 2023 (and shutting it down a year later, before reviving some of its features in-app), Strava’s mini buying spree in 2025 has so far included the Runna running app and The Breakaway personalised cycling training app. Both are only available to paying Strava users, and the acquisitions have pushed the company’s value up to $2.2 billion.
Martin can boast of strong user growth during his time in charge, adding approximately 12 million users since 2024 to boost Strava’s monthly active users up to 50 million, according to a graph in the Financial Times report; though 2023 also saw a significant increase in users.
“Growth profiles like ours… are particularly uncommon,” added Martin in his interview with the FT.
“It attracts a lot of attention, especially from bankers.”
Fittingly Strava has also made headlines recently for the rather public way it has responded to questions around its lawsuit against Garmin.
Strava demanded that Garmin stopped selling its devices over an alleged patent infringement with regards to Strava’s own segment and heatmap features. Strava’s chief product officer, Matt Salazar, took the unusual step of posting a statement about the lawsuit on Reddit, titled “setting the record straight on Garmin”, in which he explains why Strava objected to Garmin’s new developer guidelines that state the Garmin logo is present on activity posts where a Garmin device was used. Fitness watch and accessory brand Suunto has since filed a separate lawsuit, claiming that several Garmin watches infringe on five of its patents.
If and when it goes public, will Strava be offering up some free shares for segment leaders? That could make KOM/QOM hunting a whole new level of competitive…
14 thoughts on “Strava CEO Michael Martin says social fitness giant plans to go public to make “more and bigger acquisitions””
I wonder how much their
I wonder how much their recent lawsuit took off the value of their IPO.
“After acquiring Fatmap in
“After acquiring Fatmap in 2023…” then shutting it down in October 2024. Strava is just a heatmap for skiing.
Suspect further enshittification to come when Strava goes public
Strava will buy everything,
Strava will buy everything, charge a bucket load for basic features because shareholders. I barely look at it now, it’s borderline LinkedIn for sports people
I’m a paying user of Strava.
I’m a paying user of Strava. I don’t need more features, and I don’t get any value from Strava acquiring other social networks. I’d just like the features we already have to continue working, and the price to stop going up.
I get something out of it, but not enough to pay more than I’m already paying.
Some of the Strave features I
Some of the Strave features I use don’t work properly. I’d like Strava to fix them if I’m going to stay paying (I did report the issues months ago).
Will a forthcoming IPO help? Or, as kenny.ni says, will the enshittification carry on at pace?
The “enshitification” will
The “enshitification” will increase once it’s publicly owned and shareholders require return on investment
Bigfoz wrote:
Sadly all too inevtible it seems these days.
Not sure how making your product unusably awful is ever a good thing.
It’s owned by a few private
It’s owned by a few private equity company at the moment, and they’re not know for not squezing costs. So not a huge change if it floats.
Quote:
So they claim to have grown 32% since 2024? How is that possible?! They haven’t done anything of note to attract new users. There’s got to be some fudging of those numbers going on…
Well Strava are estimated to
Well Strava are estimated to have 150million users, up by about 30million since 2023.
So either the numbers are wrong or they’re counting total user base not monthly active users which is probably misleading to name it as such.
Strava had it’s day years ago
Strava had it’s day years ago… American greed has killed it!
I’ve been a user for a very
I’ve been a user for a very long time, and a paid user for a number of years. But price increases across all my exercise platforms meant something needed to go, I’ve gone back to basic non paid membership. I’m not so sure the active user base justifies the expected IPO price, and I’d be very surprised at long term survival. The IPO really has little benefit to the busiess and is just a way to try and over monetise the operation to make current owners rich cheaply
I think they should buy some
I think they should buy some golf statistics outfit and make it a permanent unhidable widget on their home screen. That’d show Garmin
Glad I’m not the only one who
Glad I’m not the only one who hates not being able to hide clutter they’ll never use.
Made worse when Garmin hide a core feature like routes.