New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series is to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.
Company name: Activetainment
Founders: Jan-Arild Svello, Jørgen Østby Damslora and Sondre Matre Fossum.
Headquarters: Oslo, Norway and Palo Alto, USA
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Activetainment develops ebove, a unique fitness concept that combines exercise with gamification and virtual reality.
Incorporating real motion with socialization and immersive visuals, we deliver the most engaging, entertaining and realistic indoor exercise experience in the world. Our first product is the ebove B/01 bike, where indoor becomes outdoor as every move is felt and experienced realistically, inside beautiful immersive and responsive visualizations of outdoor surroundings.
Users can race in real time against others through the ebove online community, or compete against their own ghost rider. Exercise whenever, wherever and with whoever you want!
2. Problem & Solution
The problem with current indoor exercise offerings is that they are not nearly as fun and motivational as they should be. Many people find exercising indoors boring and quickly give up, adding to a growing issue of physical inactivity.
This inactivity contributes to growing widespread health issues, such as obesity and cardiovascular disease. We wanted to bring technology to the table to try and help solve these issues; our ebove concept combines the best elements from exercise and gaming to make fitness fun, just as it should be.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
We will target the B2B market first, such as gym chains, hotels and corporations. We will sell our bikes through local distributors in each region, as we feel they are best placed to market and sell to their local markets. We are actively seeking distributors in each region now, and all being well we hope to enter mass production very soon.
Once we are established in these sectors we will look to the consumer market, selling our bikes through sports or electronics retailers, for example.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
We’re in an exciting time at the moment, as we gear up to enter mass production. So far we have received over 30 distribution enquiries from 20 different markets. We held a test launch in the Nordic market at the end of 2015, and have started to enter discussions with distributors in other regions.
We plan to roll out our products worldwide, making a profit initially on our hardware. Our longer term goal is to subsidise the bike’s hardware and open up for third parties to make extra software content, such as new tracks and race experiences, and then switch our revenue streams to focus on generating income from our software.
5. Management Team – with titles
Sondre Matre Fossum – Co-founder and Product Manager
Jørgen Østby Damslora – Co-founder and Head of Sales
Jan-Arild Svello – Co-founder and Head of Business Development
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Whilst we offer an incredibly realistic cycling experience, we are not trying to replace outdoor cycling. We see our solution as a more exciting, motivating and effective solution for indoor exercise. We want to put the fun back into working out, and feel that by using technology we will achieve this.
We are working on a series of other products, and hope to launch more fitness solutions that use the ebove concept, such as a rowing machine, in the near future.