Is Adidas now closing down Austria’s first flagship start-up Runtastic?

For a long time it was considered a kind of Austrian flagship start-up. Runtastic was founded in Linz in 2009 by four young entrepreneurs Florian Gschwandtner, Christian Kaar, René Giretzlehner and Alfred Luger. Their passion for running was to become a profession and the app of the same name was to break new ground in terms of recording sporting activity.

In 2015, Runtastic was finally acquired by the German sporting goods giant Adidas for 220 million euros – two years earlier, the Axel Springer publishing house had already taken a stake and secured almost half of the shares. Runtastic co-founder and company director Florian Gschwandtner withdrew from the company at the end of 2018, and the new managing director was the American Scott Dunlap. The name Runtastic would soon only be used to embellish the Austrian company, and on the app side, Adidas renamed everything to “adidas Running”.

Revision of the overhand

In 2023, the first bad news came in Austria, when 70 of 250 Runtastic employees were laid off. Adidas had fallen behind, and platforms such as Strava, Garmin and MyFitnessPal were securing more and more market share.

Now the business of the former flagship start-up seems to be on the verge of collapse. At a staff meeting on Monday morning, employees were informed that the Linz and Vienna locations would be closed, reported “nachrichten.at”. According to the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, all 200 employees are to be laid off. The first rumors about a closure emerged last week. Adidas announced further information during the course of the day.