Indianapolis Colts Running Back Jonathan Taylor Among Investors In Sports Technology Company Strive’s $6 Million Series A Round

Strive, a technology company primarily focused on measuring and analyzing muscle data for athletes, has raised $6 million in a Series A funding round.

Future Communities Capital, a Berkeley, Calif., venture capital firm, led the round, while a number of previous investors such as SeaChange Fund and SeedtoB Capital participated, as well.

Besides Future Communities, the new investors included Indianapolis Colts running back Jonathan Taylor, who led the NFL last year with 1,811 rushing yards and 18 rushing touchdowns, and Troy Smith, a former NFL quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s top player while at Ohio State in 2006.

Strive works with numerous athletes and teams, including the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs and the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball program. The company has sensors that can be inserted into compression clothing and track muscle activity to measure fatigue, load symmetry and other variables. The company offers a hardware and software platform and helps athletes train and avoid and recover from injuries.

Nikola Mrvaljevic, Strive’s chief executive and co-founder, would not disclose the company’s valuation. But he claimed it increased “noticeably” since its last funding round and expressed satisfaction with the raise during a time in the past few months when venture capital investors are being more judicious when it comes to investing in startups. Strive has now raised a total of $10.5 million since its founding in 2016. The company plans to use the latest funds to increase its staff, which currently sits at about 30 employees; invest in sales and marketing efforts; and improve its platform.

“The (funding) climate changed a little bit, for sure, but we were in a good position given the momentum and exciting product that a lot of people were able to relate to,” Mrvaljevic said. “I always joke when people ask, ‘Who’s your customer?’, I ask them, ‘Do you run, walk, cycle, jump? Do you do anything outside of your chair?’ It makes it a little more relatable and easier for people to get behind.”

He added: “The macroeconomic events that are happening right now are to an extent affecting all of us whether you’re pumping gas or buying groceries. There has been a change but we partnered with some amazing investors who understand the vision and related both as investors and potential customers, which always makes me very excited.”

Mrvaljevic conceived of Strive more than 20 years ago when he played professional basketball in Montenegro and wondered about the strain he and his teammates were putting on their bodies during practices and games. He moved to the United States in the early 2000s and earned degrees in biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering from the University of Rhode Island.

After graduating, Mrvaljevic worked for several years as an engineer at Fluke Corp., a Seattle-area medical device company. All along, he had been thinking about launching a sports technology company, and in 2016, he took the plunge after sending cold emails to 48 college coaches across the U.S. and explaining his goal of measuring and analyzing data and helping them improve performance.

“When 42 of them responded and invited me on-site, that’s when I realized I might be on to something,” he said. “That moment where coaches related to our vision and were able to validate our value proposition is something where we realized, ‘OK, this is real.’ I didn’t spend too much time, if any, having an internal negotiation with myself whether I wanted to pursue this product. I was very committed right off the bat because of that validation and interest from coaches.”

Through the years, Strive’s product has evolved to where now the company is targeting the evaluation of muscles, particularly the glutes, hamstrings and quadriceps. The platform uses software powered by Microsoft’sMSFT
Power BI data visualization tool to make the information easier to decipher.

While most of Strive’s customers are athletes and professional and college teams, the company also works with the military, physical therapists and manufacturing workers, all of whom need access to muscle data.

“Our mission always is to empower players and coaches, and our mission is to make sure that they understand the data sets,” Mrvaljevic said. “We are very focused on making sure the customer, whether its an athlete or whether it’s a coach or a military operator, that they’re focused on understanding what is the data telling them…It’s really important for all of us to aspire to digest this data in the simplest and easiest to understand terms. That’s something we’re trying to improve on a constant basis.”