MORGAN HILL, Calif. (BRAIN) — Smack at the intersection of the bike industry and Silicon Valley, Zone 5 is a startup incubator with technology allowing developers to quickly bring cycling apps to market.
The company’s backers included Mike Sinyard, the founder and president of Specialized; Zone 5’s co-founder and CEO is Chris Yu, who leads Specialized’s Innovation & Engineering teams. The company is distinct from Specialized, however, and Yu runs it in his off hours.
Zone 5 also has absorbed Today’s Plan, an Australia-based company that develops web-based training software. Today’s Plan’s founders, Ben Bowley and Andrew Hall, have joined the new company.
Yu said Zone 5’s technology, coming out of Today’s Plan, includes a cloud- based platform containing building blocks for sports apps. The building blocks allow apps to connect to wireless devices. Building those connections is often the most time consuming part of developing a new app, he said.
“It almost doesn’t matter how good your idea is, if you don’t get the blocking and tackling right when it comes down to connectivity and files, things aren’t going to work,” he said.
“The health-fitness-endurance sport world, when it comes to digital technology, is in a uniquely challenging space because you have to do everything that social network apps do, which is to connect people and have profiles and things like that. But then you also have to deal with crazy niche sensors and connectivity with different watches, different heart rate monitors, power meters, e-bikes, anything that can generate information ... not to mention file types like GPS data from different phones. All the things that all of us, as users, take for granted, that’s where things fall down,” Yu told BRAIN.
Besides access to those building blocks, Zone 5 is offering mentorship and a small investment fund to entrepreneurs with related ideas. It also plans to develop relationships with sports scientists, students, and other researchers, making anony- mized activity data available to them.
Yu said Zone 5 came together as Specialized invested to develop its own cycling app with the help of Today’s Plan.
“We used (Today’s Plan) to do backend core work on the Specialized ride app, and our app development accelerated. We realized that they had a lot of value here and we came across other companies that have some of the same problems,” he said.
Besides Specialized, Today’s Plan has provided backend work to clients including Stage’s Cycling, Zwift Academy, Stryd, Wahoo, and Quarq.
Yu said Zone 5 is looking to work with companies with ideas for apps related to cycling and other endurance sports.
“There’s no shortage of great ideas out there,” said Yu, who said Zone 5’s goal is to reduce the barrier of entry and “have more ideas hit the market, faster.”
Yu said the company will eventually be based in Boulder, Colorado.
