Blog #4: Rouvy Acquires FulGaz
This morning, we woke up to a series of Shane Miller tweets seeming to tease a surprise Rouvy acquisition of FulGaz.
Rouvy confirmed the takeover shortly thereafter on its Twitter account. Ironman, which had bought the platform back in 2021 coming off the Covid cycling boom, has apparently laid off all of the FulGaz staff and sold off the platform to Rouvy.1 We don’t have any more information than what is in this excellent DC Rainmaker post, so read that for the most detailed breakdown of the acquisition we’ve seen thus far.
Needless to say, this is a pretty big shakeup of the virtual cycling space. It’s the second major platform transaction in the past few months, following the TrainingPeaks acquisition of IndieVelo in October. A couple of initial hot takes:
It will be interesting to see if Rouvy can seamlessly migrate all the FulGaz users over to its platform and, more importantly, retain them moving forward. According to DC Rainmaker, FulGaz “topp[ed] out at roughly 20,000 paid monthly subscribers” at its peak. Zwift, the biggest player in the space, has over 1 million. I have no idea what Rouvy’s current number is, but even if every FulGaz user stays with Rouvy it won’t make a major dent in Zwift’s market dominance in the immediate term.
Rouvy has yet to really take the plunge into the professional virtual racing world. They’ve had some really cool events - the La Vuelta Virtual, which had an in-person final in Madrid - drew a lot of attention to the platform. They also have a partnership with Team Visma | Lease a Bike and feature Wout van Aert fairly prominently on their site. So they’ve dabbled in the pro racing scene, both virtually and IRL, and of course we’d love to see them really commit to the space moving forward.
That being said, the Ironman partnership probably complicates things, insofar as it seems to indicate that resources will be prioritized towards triathletes rather than pro virtual bike racing.2 Which, I mean, fair enough! It’s a cool partnership! I won’t pretend to know a ton about the triathlon world, so once again go see DC Rainmaker’s post and the comment section.
Anyway, we will be following this story closely moving forward. If you’ve got thoughts, leave them in the comments below or shoot us an email at info@proecycling.com.
Needless to say, not cool!
A quote from Petr Samek, Rouvy’s CEO, on the acquisition as to Rouvy’s goals moving forward: “Our collaboration with IRONMAN marks a significant milestone in making ROUVY the go-to indoor cycling platform for triathletes. We’re thrilled to provide users with an immersive and effective way to train, helping them achieve their triathlon goals and discover courses around the world that they may never have the opportunity to ride in real life.”