Strava for elite athletes
HYBRD is Strava for elite athletes who do more than just cardio. It brings all your training data together by integrating with top wearables and uses AI to make tracking weightlifting easy. This allows athletes to fully understand their training load, track holistic progress over time, and compete with friends in fresh, exciting ways. Existing products tend to focus on only one type of exercise—either cardio or strength—leaving hybrid athletes juggling disconnected tools. As hybrid athletes themselves the founders found this frustrating and set out to build the unified approach they needed for their training. Three of HYBRD’s founders previously worked at WHOOP, each leading teams across product, growth and analytics. In parallel, Mats was a member of the US national rowing team and Ben, Shoe and Ruiters have all completed Ironman 70.3s.
Active Founders
Ben Katz, Founder
Co-Founder & CEO of HYBRD. Previously led the growth product team at WHOOP and the fitness app portfolio at Appex. In my free time I train as a hybrid athlete, having completed a 50k ultramarathon, an Ironman 70.3, and am currently preparing for my first full Ironman.
Matt Ruiters, Founder
🇿🇦 Co-Founder & CTO @ HYBRD, the Strava for elite athletes. Exercise and cooking keep me sane. Loved playing rugby, but since my shoulders gave out, I've gotten into triathlon and surfing. Previously worked on billing and global resiliency @ AWS. Let's ship.
Caroline "Shoe" Shoemaker, Founder
Shoe has had years of experience in the fitness tech space, first at WHOOP building their analytics team, then at Appex, a mobile app roll-up company responsible for 1/2 the portfolio. Now she's focused on building HYBRD, the Strava for elite athletes while training for an Ironman in 2025.
Mats Terwiesch, Founder
At HYBRD, I’m focused on core product and sport science. I previously was an early employee and product manager at WHOOP, where I launched the Strength Trainer feature and expanded free trials internationally. I also have experience leading product management for the fitness vertical of a profitable mobile app roll-up, and was a research associate publishing on health and artificial intelligence at Harvard. In parallel to my tech career, I was a member of the US national rowing team.
Company Launches
TL;DR
HYBRD is Strava for elite athletes who do more than just cardio. We’re ex-WHOOP, ex-US national rowing team, triathletes/ultramarathoners, and we are building the app that we wish existed for us.
Problem
Athletes who train both strength and cardio lack a unified way to track and visualize their training. They track cardio with apps like Garmin, Coros, WHOOP, or Strava and log strength workouts with others like Hevy, Strong, Stronglifts, or even good ol’ pen and paper.
This fragmented tracking makes it difficult to train effectively and impossible to compete with friends who train in different disciplines.
Solution
First, HYBRD integrates with all leading wearables to pull in your runs, rides, and more.
Then, we make it really easy to track your weightlifting.
You can input your workout to our AI logger using text— or simply upload a picture of your training journal, a whiteboard from a CrossFit gym, or a screenshot from an app you already use.
Based on that data, we provide a holistic view of your strength and cardio abilities, normalized for age/gender/weight, and give you a single score (analogous to a chess Elo score) that you can compare with your training buddies.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be adding more detailed analyses and competitive social features.
Asks
- Apply to join HYBRD
- Share this post with the most athletic people you know
Team
Three of our founders previously worked at WHOOP, each of us leading teams across product, growth, and analytics. Our CTO, Ruiters, was a senior technical lead at Amazon AWS.
We are all hybrid athletes ourselves—Mats was a member of the US national rowing team, and Shoe, Ben, and Ruiters have all completed Ironman 70.3s.
Each of us felt underserved by existing fitness apps— to the point where we tracked our workouts in Google Sheets— so we decided to build HYBRD.
Check out our demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBvnawK7If0