Zwift, which turns indoor cycling workouts into multiplayer games, raises $120M Series B led by Highland Europe
Fitness and gaming have been two of the most popular categories of apps for years, and now a startup founded out of London that has combined the two in a unique way has picked …
Context & Ripple Effects
Zwift's $120M Series B lands six months after fellow subscription fitness app Aaptiv closed its own $22M Series C, marking 2018 as the year investors began treating app-based fitness as a fundable category rather than a niche. What separates Zwift is the gaming layer: it sells multiplayer competition, not just classes, which gives it the engagement mechanics of a game studio inside a fitness subscription.
The round also proved prescient — two years later Zwift raised a $450M Series C led by KKR at a $1B+ valuation, making this Highland Europe-led round the entry point for institutional capital into what became the category's first unicorn.
First-order effects
- Zwift gets growth capital from a European lead investor to scale its multiplayer cycling platform while rivals were still selling solo workout content.
- Highland Europe gains a position in the fastest-scaling connected-fitness company of the moment, ahead of the US-focused funds that later crowded in.
Second-order effects
- Hardware-and-content competitors like iFit answered with their own mega-rounds — iFit raised $200M in 2019 citing 330,000 paying subscribers — turning connected fitness into an arms race over subscription scale.
- Coaching- and community-led apps such as Future ($150/month human coaches) and race-discovery platform Let's Do This had to differentiate on human services and event data precisely because Zwift owned the virtual-competition lane.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, fitness consolidates around platform businesses whose moat is social graph and multiplayer engagement rather than content libraries or equipment — the structure that let Zwift command a nine-figure Series C and unicorn pricing.
- Endurance sports becomes a data-linked stack — training apps feeding recommendation and racing platforms like Let's Do This — pulling sponsorship and event economics toward whoever owns the athlete's digital profile.
The trend: Connected fitness is shifting from recorded-content subscriptions to multiplayer, socially competitive platforms, with venture rounds escalating from tens to hundreds of millions as engagement data proves out.