Strava is eying up an initial public offering in the US, after rumours began to circulate last month.
Strava’s CEO Michael Martin told the Financial Times that Strava has an “intention to go public at some points”.
Martin said there were lots of benefits to going public, which “provides easy access to capital in case we wanted to do more and bigger acquisitions”. However, Martin did not offer a precise timeline, according to the FT.
Reuters reported last month that Strava had invited banks, including Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, to pitch for roles in the IPO.
The potential IPO follows a booming period for Strava. The San Francisco-based company closed a fundraising round valuing it at $2.2 billion back in May 2025.
The app has also seen a huge increase in users, with an average of 50m active users this year. Downloads in the year to September were up around 80 per cent compared to the same period in 2024.
“Growth profiles like ours… are particularly uncommon, especially at scale,” Martin told the FT. “It attracts a lot of attention – especially from bankers.”
Since Martin took over from Strava’s co-founder Michael Horvath in 2024, his focus has been on adding tools to boost user growth and paid subscriptions, according to the FT.
This year, Strava bought Runna, a running coaching app, and the cycling training platform The Breakaway, which both bring personalised training plans to the app.
But, most recently, Strava has been embroiled in a battle with Garmin. Strava recently filed a lawsuit against Garmin for alleged patent infringement, related to segments and heatmap functionality.
Strava’s chief product officer Matt Salazar then said on Reddit that Garmin had threatened to cut off access to its Application Programming Interface, unless Strava complies with its new developer guidelines. The guidelines require “the Garmin logo to be present on every single activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing card, etc,” according to Salazar.
Independently of Strava, Suunto is also suing Garmin over alleged patent infringement, claiming that many Garmin smartwatches incorporate patented technologies without permission.
