Asics Buys Runkeeper as Apps & Athletic tools continue to Merge
[updated 2/12/16, 3:32 p.m., to incorporate deal value and small print from Asics’s press release.] eastern shoemaker Asics just received one in all Boston’s perfect-identified consumer tech corporations, Runkeeper, for $ 85 million, as the digital and physical worlds proceed to collide in athletics.
Runkeeper co-founder and CEO Jason Jacobs announced the acquisition in a Medium weblog submit early Friday morning. Reached by way of email, Jacobs declined to talk about the structure of the deal, but it’s seemingly a good end result for the company’s traders and staff, given it had raised about $ eleven.5 million in challenge capital.
When Runkeeper dad or mum company FitnessKeeper launched in 2008, its app was once one of the vital early tools that enabled customers to trace runs and other sorts of workout routines, map out routes, and share fitness accomplishments with their pals. the company says it has attracted greater than forty five million customers—no straightforward feat for a consumer app. (The challenge, as at all times, used to be how you can make cash.)
alongside the way in which, Runkeeper has partnered with firms like Pebble and other wearable software makers to combine the app with their bodily products. Runkeeper also started dabbling in apparel recently, launching a website to promote its own line of garb and other equipment. but the company’s direction has been rocky every now and then—it lower sixteen employees, or about 30 p.c of its group of workers, final August.
by using joining Asics, Runkeeper gains get admission to to more tools to continue evolving its product, and the transfer opens up new how to engage with consumers, Jacobs stated. Asics, meanwhile, already deals an internet coaching and health-monitoring program for runners, but it clearly sees Runkeeper as a way to enhance its cellular presence. Asics additionally said it plans to use the Runkeeper app to “establish a one-to-one marketing channel utilizing user data.” [earlier sentence introduced from the Asics free up—Eds.]
“after we look in advance, it appears clear that the health brands of the long run will not just make bodily merchandise, however can be embedded in the shopper trip in methods in order to help keep individuals stimulated and maximize their enjoyment of activity,” Jacobs wrote in his weblog put up. “through placing these two pieces collectively (digital fitness platform and world-category physical merchandise), that you could construct a new kind of health brand that has a deeper, extra relied on relationship with consumers and may interact with them in a more customized means. Partnering with Asics to fulfill this imaginative and prescient collectively makes a ton of sense.”
other large athletic shoe and apparel firms have the identical theory. closing 12 months, under Armour offered health-monitoring apps Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, whereas Adidas purchased Runtastic.
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