Global Trends

Why Everyone You Know Is on Strava

The Instagram story has a new format. A photo of someone mid-run or flushed at the finish, and pasted

By Conor Healy

August 13, 2026

The Instagram story has a new format. A photo of someone mid-run or flushed at the finish, and pasted over it, a screenshot from Strava: the map of the route, the distance, the pace. The workout and the selfie now travel together, and they are everywhere, posted by people who two years ago would never have called themselves runners.

Strava has around 180 million registered users, up from 150 million in the middle of last year, one of the fastest growth phases in its history. It has filed confidentially for a US stock market listing, with Goldman Sachs leading and a debut possible as early as this spring. A company that began as a niche tool for serious cyclists is about to go public on the strength of having turned exercise into a social act.

What Is Strava?

Strava is a fitness app that records physical activity, mainly running and cycling, and wraps a social network around the data.

Founded in 2009 by two former Harvard rowing teammates, Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey, it lets users track a workout through their phone or a GPS watch, then see detailed statistics: distance, pace, elevation, heart rate, and how each effort compares with their own history and with other people’s. The name is Swedish for “strive.”

What separates it from a plain tracker is the layer on top. Every activity becomes a post on a feed that friends and followers can see and react to. The company describes itself less as a fitness tool than as a community, and the numbers behind the social features are as large as the user count. Strava recorded 14 billion “kudos,” its version of a like, in 2025 alone, two billion more than the year before.

Why Is Strava So Popular?

Strava is popular because it turned working out into a form of social currency, applying the mechanics of Instagram to the previously private act of going for a run.

The core of it is two features. Kudos are lightweight social approval, a tap that says “well done” on a specific run or ride, and they accumulate into the same quiet reward loop that powers every social platform. Segments are stretches of road or trail on which every user who has ever run or cycled them is ranked, so an amateur can measure a climb against friends, local rivals, and even professionals who have covered the same ground. A workout stops being a solitary effort and becomes an entry on a shared leaderboard.

That design landed in the middle of a genuine cultural shift. Running has become one of the defining social activities for people in their teens and twenties, many of whom are drinking less and looking for ways to meet people that do not revolve around a bar. The run club has become what the pub used to be, and the marathon has become, only half-jokingly, the new dating app. Applications for the 2026 London Marathon jumped 31% to a record 1.1 million people.

Strava sits underneath all of it. It is where the run club posts its Saturday session, where a solo runner finds the encouragement to keep going, and where a training log becomes something worth sharing. The app spreads the way social networks always have, through people showing their friends, except that here the content is the friends’ own effort rather than a celebrity’s.

There is a status dimension too. A hard-earned run posted to Strava is a flex that reads as healthy rather than boastful, a way to signal discipline and progress without appearing to show off. In a feed full of curated leisure, evidence of doing something difficult stands out.

Inside the Strava IPO

The Strava IPO is the moment this cultural rise becomes a financial event.

A funding round in May 2025 valued the company at $2.2 billion, up 47% from its 2020 valuation, led by Sequoia Capital and TCV. The company is reportedly approaching around $500 million in annual recurring revenue, growing roughly 50% year on year, with about 90% of that revenue coming from paid subscriptions at $11.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Analysts expect a public listing to seek a valuation between $2 and $3 billion.

That financial profile is unusual for a consumer app heading to market. Strava is not a growth-at-all-costs story burning cash for scale; it is already close to profitable, funded largely by users who choose to pay for deeper analytics and training features. Its backers, some of whom have held on for more than a decade, are looking for the liquidity that a listing provides.

The timing is deliberate. Goldman Sachs is reported to be advising on a window that captures renewed investor appetite for high-growth technology names before any volatility around the US midterm elections. After a long drought in technology listings, Strava is positioned to lead a new wave, carried by a community large enough and loyal enough to make the subscription numbers work.

The Data Underneath the Kudos

One honest note belongs in any account of Strava’s rise. The same feature that makes it valuable, the vast and detailed record of where millions of people move and when, carries real sensitivity.

The company holds one of the largest datasets in existence on how recreational athletes actually train, information that is genuinely useful to insurers, healthcare providers, and consumer brands. The power of that data has been demonstrated before: a public heatmap of user activity once inadvertently revealed the layout of secret military bases, traced by the running routes of the soldiers stationed there. Going public tends to sharpen the pressure to make more of an asset like that, which is worth watching as the company enters a market that rewards monetisation.

None of it has dented the appeal so far. For most users, trading a bit of data for a place on the leaderboard is a deal they are glad to make, and the feed keeps filling with maps, paces, and kudos.

The Network Made of Movement

Strava’s achievement is to have built a social network that most of its users would never call one.

It arrived as people were leaving the older platforms, tired of the arguments and the performance, and it offered a version of the same social rewards attached to something that made them feel better rather than worse. The content is real effort, the approval is warm, and the comparison, for once, tends to push people toward doing something good for themselves.

That is why it ended up pasted over the Instagram stories. Strava did not just track the runs that everyone suddenly started going on. It gave people a reason to tell each other about them, and turned a private habit into a public one. The IPO is the confirmation, in the language of markets, of something its users worked out a while ago.