Better Know A #Barcelona #Startup: Runator (@runator)

The start of this tale goes back to a wintery day during Christmas of 2013. A team of keen Spanish runners had just signed up for the 2014 New York Marathon and were planning their training to make sure they were in ship-shape for race day. Understandably as the team began to get together to prepare for the coming months, questions started to arise such as; how do you train? how often? what is your predicted finished time?

The team wanted to train together (but not all in the same place) so tracking how often everyone was training and, their pace and distance was important to ensure that everyone was on target to achieve their finish time goals. They quickly realized that the majority used different running apps so this was going to be a task that even MacGyver couldn’t fix.

Instead of giving up on their team dream, they put their heads together and came up with Runator, the hub for running apps. By pulling running workouts from different running apps such as Runkeeper, Endomondo, Runtastic, Nike+, Strava, Polar or Garmin; runners have all the stats from their friends at their fingertips on just one platform. Apart from creating a social environment and allowing team training across various apps, you can challenge your friends while keeping the data in one place.

The running market is huge and it continues to grow at exponential rates. If you just take into account the 5 above apps, there are around 100M active users who all registering runs each day who are all potential clients of Runator. Over the past 6 years in New York and Madrid (where the team is located), the number of participants of the marathon has grown 29% and 43.5% respectively.

Runator is currently financed by its four founders, Bruno Muñoz, Ruben Gomez, Ester Villanueva and Elizabeth Navarro however in order to keep running, the team is looking to it is looking to raise a seed round to focus on strategic partnerships and international growth.

“Finally, the social running app is here. We allow you o break the barriers you find with so many running apps and focus just on one thing, running” says co-founder & Head of Marketing Ester Villanueva.

Photo credits

Woman running via Shutterstock