Ironman Sells FulGaz to Rouvy, and Plenty More

In a move that will probably surprise nobody within the industry, Ironman has decided that owning an indoor cycling platform wasn’t really their jam. As a result, Ironman has sold off FulGaz to Rouv. Meanwhile, Ironman has concurrently announced a new partnership with Rouvy, to be their indoor training platform partner going forward. Oh, and Ironman gave notice to all FulGaz employees (including it’s founder) as part of the sale, meaning those are gone shortly too.

Got all that? No? Don’t worry, it gets messier.

As a reminder, FulGaz is an indoor cycling platform that has real videos recorded outside that you can ride inside. Obviously they’ve got all the famous climbs and such, but also a massive library of some 2,200 videos within the platform today, including almost all of the Ironman branded races. Generally speaking, FulGaz was known for higher-quality videos (and streaming) than most of their competitors.

So, let’s talk about what happened, and what happens next.

The Backstory:

FulGaz has long held its place in the indoor trainer platform industry as one of the most polished platforms, while also tending to be one of the ones most on the cutting edge of technical implementations. When it came to hardware companies (like Wahoo) wanting to demonstrate new hardware (such as the Wahoo KICKR CLIMB), you’d usually find FulGaz at the front of the line helping these companies to do so. They perfected how to make the KICKR CLIMB simulations feel perfectly realistic, well before any other company did. Likewise, they were far ahead of the curve on Apple TV and other platforms.

(FulGaz in 2018, used in a private CES demo suite in Las Vegas, one of the first times the KICKR CLIMB was on display)

But they were also small, often in a good way. The founder, Mike Clucas, did almost everything for years solo-cup, and was still its leader now a decade later. The team eventually grew, both in terms of subscribers and employees – topping out at roughly 20,000 paid monthly subscribers.

Of course, FulGaz caught the attention of Ironman back in 2021. While everyone was doing the COVID thing, indoor trainer platforms were doing the peak-bubble thing. Companies were buying each other, and making offers for silly money. We saw Wahoo buy RGT, Zwift make an unsuccessful move for TrainerRoad, and Peloton printing bikes like candy.

Ironman decided to get into the game in the fall of 2021, deciding that they needed to have additional revenue streams (digitally based), given virtually nobody was racing in the real world. As you might remember, people were incredibly hesitant to trainer for a year for an Ironman event, with cancellation prospects high. In many ways, the move did actually have merit in concept. But as you’ll see, execution was tough.

After the acquisition, Ironman did start to invest into FulGaz. That occurred both in staffing, but also raising the profile. We’ve since seen FulGaz listed on banners alongside Ironman courses, in the finishers chute, and the endless e-mails the company sends.

The problem though was that triathletes are fickle creatures, and specifically, fickle creatures of habit when it comes to training (as a triathlete, I’m more than allowed to say that). Before the purchase of FulGaz, cyclists (non-triathletes) were the overwhelming majority of the base. Obviously, Ironman tried to change that composition through various promotional activities, but ultimately, it only peaked at about 15% of the total user base.

The challenge with that was that while Ironman was trying to change the demographics of FulGaz, they stopped promoting it within cycling-specific realms. Various in-game events/races that FulGaz would try with triathletes simply didn’t work. Triathletes wanted to get on the trainer, and do the workout as prescribed. Generally speaking, triathletes aren’t racing for the sprint or trying to conquer a col. Most of FulGaz’s events were about trying to knock out various sets of courses that didn’t really appeal to triathletes who simply needed to complete the structured workout on their calendar.

More challenging though to FulGaz, was the continual budget cuts it received. Each successive year would see fewer and fewer staff, and near-annual halving of the budgets. While nobody expected the 2020/2021 indoor training bubble (or budgets) to last forever, FulGaz is now at the smallest staffing level it’s been since before Ironman, despite being considerably bigger.

With Ironman largely hamstringing FulGaz’s non-triathlete growth, the platform mostly stagnated in terms of subscribers. Add to that secondary headwinds, such as the announcement by TrainingPeaks of the acquisition of IndieVelo. That announcement cut 10% of the FulGaz user base overnight. That make sense: Many triathletes don’t really care where they do their structured/coached TrainingPeaks workouts, they just want something that’s easy and mindless. This checked those boxes.

The Sale & Rouvy Partnership:

Recently, Ironman visited the FulGaz offices in Melbourne for the first time since the acquisition. It would also be the last time. Upon arrival, they announced everyone had been laid off (including the FulGaz founder), and the company’s remaining assets had been sold to Rouvy. Nobody within FulGaz expected this, or was aware a sale was even in the cards. Everyone has described it as being completely blindsided.

Concurrently, Ironman didn’t offer to Rouvy to bring the FulGaz talent/people as part of the acquisition. There was no prior due-diligence done at a technical or employee level, as it customary in any acquisition. As a result, they’re now having to try and convince various FulGaz employees (who were already notified they didn’t have jobs) to stay on for temporary periods of time to help with the transition.

As part of the acquisition deal, Rouvy now becomes the Ironman online cycling platform partner for FulGaz. Presumably, you’ll soon start to see Rouvy billboards instead of FulGaz ones, in real-world courses. Plus of course, all of the usual Ironman partner marketing stuff. This is a 5-year partnership.

Athletes who sign-up for an Ironman or Ironman 70.3 race can also get a free 30-day trial of Rouvy, though, you can also get that by just using Google.

Going Forward:

So what happens to FulGaz users? And what about Rouvy users? Well, some pieces are clear, but a lot of that is frankly pretty fuzzy (largely due to how the sale went down). In short, here’s what happens:

1) Effective today, the Top 20 most popular FulGaz routes are now within Rouvy, including Ironman & Ironman 70.3 courses. You can do these courses today in the Rouvy platform, just like any other route you might have done.

2) The existing FulGaz apps remain online, though, don’t expect any further meaningful updates to them. Those apps will continue to work, but will be retired. Rouvy doesn’t have a timeline for when that’ll happen. Your subscriptions will continue, and you’ll keep paying for the FulGaz platform.

3) Rouvy still needs to figure out how to migrate FulGaz users to Rouvy. They say that once they figure that out, they’ll notify users on how that’ll work to migrate all of your stuff over.

4) Rouvy is working on migrating the Top 100 FulGaz courses quickly. This one is pretty self-explanatory.

In an e-mail with Rouvy CEO Petr Samek, he noted they see a lot of opportunity with FulGaz and the existing content, saying:

“We believe that the key is the content. We want to identify the missing content and migrate it to ROUVY (not only IRONMAN courses, I am speaking about cycling content mostly). Still, the majority of FulGaz users are cyclists. Also, we want to ensure the users migration as smooth as possible including the subscription, training/career status etc.”

Likewise, in talking with the founder of FulGaz, Mike Clucas, he noted that of the demo’s he’s seen using FulGaz’s higher-resolution/quality videos, blended with Rouvy’s augmented reality technologies, it was super impressive. And in an e-mail to all existing FulGaz users, he echoed that, saying:

“By moving the FulGaz content to its new home, I am confident that the ride experience I dreamed of creating at FulGaz will be realized by the team at ROUVY. Having met them and worked with them in our offices, I believe they have the team and resources to do amazing new things that I am confident you will enjoy for a long time to come.”

Of course, while FulGaz and Rouvy have overlap, they are also quite different in many ways. Rouvy has leaned far more heavily into online racing, overlays of augmented data atop real-world videos, and plenty more in that realm. Their refreshed apps over the last year have made things quite a bit better as well.

The key difference between Ironman’s acquisition of FulGaz, and the new Ironman partnership with Rouvy, is that Rouvy doesn’t have to solely pivot to focusing on triathletes. They still get to focus on cyclists, and now, get to give those FulGaz cyclists the attention they deserve again. Likewise, Rouvy gets all the valuable Ironman course content (and likely various licenses to film new content during race days and such), and can likely give triathletes more global course coverage than FulGaz had (including for other routes beyond Ironman).

That said, I’m still skeptical this will result in a large boost to Rouvy’s subscriber numbers. Or even a moderate boost. Ultimately, any digital platform that shacks up with Ironman faces the same problems FulGaz did: Triathletes are fickle creatures that prefer highly structured workouts from their coaches with minimal fuss. While Rouvy can deliver that in basically the same way that FulGaz did, it’s hard to argue with the value prop that TrainingPeaks/TrainingPeaks Virtual (aka IndieVelo) does, especially when it’s included in a subscription. As I said before, the TrainingPeaks acquisition might be one of the smartest sports tech acquisitions we’ve seen in a long-long time.

Still, if you were a Rouvy user, you’ve got the win of soon getting a bunch of new courses, especially Ironman-branded courses.

With that – thanks for reading!