Strava
Community-Powered Motivation
Strava is Swedish for “strive,” which epitomizes who we are and what we do. We’re a passionate and committed team, unified by our mission to connect athletes to what motivates them and help them find their personal best. And with billions of activity uploads from all over the world, we have a humbling and audacious vision: to be the record of the world’s athletic activities and the technology that makes every effort count.
Strava was founded in 2009 by Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey who first met in the 1980s as members of Harvard University’s rowing crew. It is backed by Sequoia Capital, Madrone Partners and Jackson Square Ventures.
The online application tracks your runs, rides and swims, and adds a social networking feature to share your workouts, best times, or to workout together. It started out tracking mostly outdoor cycling and running activities using GPS data, but now incorporates several dozen other exercise types, including indoor activities.
The app records data for a user’s activities, which can then be shared with the user’s followers or shared publicly. If an activity is shared publicly, Strava automatically groups activities that occur at the same time and place (such as taking part in a marathon, or group ride).
An activity’s recorded information may include a route summary, elevation (net and unidirectional), speed (average, minimum, maximum), timing (total and moving time), power and heart rate. Activities can be recorded using the mobile app or from devices made by other companies like Garmin, Suunto and more. Activities can also be entered manually via the Strava website.There is also Strava Metro, a program marketed towards city planners, uses cycling data from Strava users in supported cities and regions.
Strava incorporates social media features which allow users to post their exercises to followers. Alongside a GPS map of their exercise users can also post pictures and videos. Followers can then comment on posts and give ‘kudos’ in the form of a like button. Beacon is a feature that allows Strava users to share their location in real time with anyone they choose to, and nominate others as a safety contact for their workout. Other premium features include access to custom route-building tools and access to map segment leaderboards.
Strava maintains a system of leaderboards that show the most frequent runners or riders on a segment, as well as the fastest times by activity type. These fastest segment times (also known as KOMs (King of the Mountain) for cycling segments, or CRs (Course Record) for running segments) have been widely criticized for including times by athletes banned for doping, as well as fake times logged by motorized vehicles and other forms of cheating. In response, Strava released tools for users to report suspicious activities.
Strava uses a freemium model with some features only available in the paid subscription plan. It initially became popular with cyclists and then runners, and by 2017 over 1 billion activities had been uploaded to the service.
- 120M+ athletes across 190+ countries.
- 40M uploads every week.
- 6B activities recorded.