Volt Athletics is teaming up with one of the biggest names in sports business.
The Seattle startup today announced a new partnership with Gatorade and will rename its strength and conditioning consumer app to “Volt Fueled by Gatorade.”
The revamped app combines Volt’s “intelligent” workout technology with Gatorade’s sports nutrition expertise, offering a more complete digital fitness guide for athletes.
It’s a milestone deal for Volt, which has more than 100,000 users across 120 countries on its platform that launched in 2013. Volt CEO and co-founder Dan Giuliani called it “a truly unique offering in the fitness app space” and said it could lead to similar partnerships with other companies.
“Partnering with Gatorade allows Volt to take a huge step toward providing a truly comprehensive training platform for our athletes,” he told GeekWire. “When you think about all the factors that can affect an athlete’s performance — strength training, cardiovascular conditioning, sleep, hydration, nutrition, nutrient timing, rest and recovery practices, and more — you can see the potential for future partnership opportunities.”
Volt not only tracks and stores workout metrics for more than 35 sports, but its app also offers personalized, mobile-friendly training content that adjusts based on a user’s performance. The partnership with Gatorade will add nutrition tips tailored to pre- and post-workout occasions, along with other related content like video tips.
Michael Smith, head of digital strategy at PepsiCo-Gatorade, said the company saw a “natural synergy” with Volt.
“Our goal is to help the athlete improve through better understanding of sports nutrition,” he said. “This integration allows us to do that by putting sports nutrition education in the context of a workout.”
Smith added that Gatorade is looking to expand beyond its traditional sports drinks or energy bars, and into digital services. Gatorade, which launched the Gatorade Sports Science Institute more than three decades ago, is dipping its toes into everything from live-streaming to Snapchat games.
“As digital technology becomes more ubiquitous, it presents an opportunity to democratize access to the type of information and tools that historically have only been available to elite athletes,” he said.
Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
Volt has a separate app for teams called “Volt for Teams” used by clients like the U.S. National football team, University of Washington, University of Michigan, University of Nebraska, Clemson University, Red Bull Crashed Ice Team USA, Kenya 7s Rugby, the Denver Stampede professional rugby team, the Northamptonshire Steelbacks professional cricket team, and more.
The company’s consumer app, now called “Volt Fueled by Gatorade,” launched last year and charges users $9.99 per month. Volt employs 20 people and has raised $3 million to date, including an investment from soccer star DeAndre Yedlin.
