Our investment in Eastnine

Jason Goodman is well known in the London venture community: he previously founded and exited digital marketing agency Tribal (Omnicom) and Product Design Studio Albion (MDC), where he developed brand and marketing strategies for the likes of Innocent, Skype, Betfair, Zoopla, King. After exiting Albion, he was Venture Partner with us and and Entrepreneur in Residence at Atomico. He has also been an active London Angel and we are co investors in Cleo (where he is a non exec director) and Plum Guide.

Last year we started discussing F5 (which was a code name for the five most important people in his life) which has grown into Eastnine, a fitness tech company, with the mission to address the 99% and enable members to ‘never train alone’. Eastnine is focussed on the future of fitness, with an app that combines the motivation of a group experience, with social and tracking elements and the convenience of a workout wherever you can fit it in, powered by a curated group of coaches and sports talent people love.

Health and fitness technology is a theme we’ve tracked closely. Traditional gyms and studios are losing customers as they haven’t found ways to encourage users to keep to a daily routine. Connected exercise equipment is entering the home with 500k connected cyclists already in the UK, there are over 11m runners in the UK, and 4 out of 10 exercisers track their performance.

In a large and highly competitive market, we fundamentally believe in backing outliers; surfers most capable of riding the biggest waves, and our belief in Jason stems from working with him directly, understanding his passion to improve health through fitness and using technology to make training more social, coupled with his very strong ability to build a team.

Jason’s three co-founders are united by their shared passion and have strong sports, entertainment, design and engineering backgrounds: Cat Forrest (ex GB athlete) is talent lead, Matt Harrison (first team mate at Albion / Strategy Director Seymour Powell) is product lead, and David McCreary (ex Next VR & Boiler Room) is technology lead.

Today we’re thrilled to share the iOS beta product for running which has some really exciting social features like the live leaderboard, a distinct British tone of voice, underpinned by a unique approach to talent focussing on prominent coaches who’ve competed in professional sports.

We’re proud lead investors alongside our partners Cherry in Berlin, with backing from some of Europe’s best known angels Skype-founder Niklas Zennstrom, former Spotify CMO Sophia Bendz, founder of Supercell, Ilkka Paananen, Moo Founder Richard Moross and Absolute Radio co-founder Clive Dickens.

To sign up head over to Eastnine — look forward to running with you!