It’s the time of the year when the running events season starts in the Nordic cities – And we got great news from the Finnish MyNextRun, a service that helps runners to discover and sign up for running events. MyNextRun announced that they’ve raised €1 million in their latest financing round. Their ‘world’s biggest international running event calendar’, MyNextRun.com, lists a total of 14 000 events and has currently 600 partner events around the Europe.
The financing round of MyNextRun started in the beginning of this year and it attracted some well-known investors, such as the Investor and Chairman of upmysport Christian Lorenzen, Private Investor Omar Bisi, Investor and Chairman of YPlan (also known as the founder of Active Hotels/Booking.com) Andy Phillips and the Finnish Funding agency Tekes. A total of 70% of the rounds investments were made by private investors.
Changes in the running market
MyNextRun has been expanding fast in Europe and they’re growing with a 500% turnover at the moment. The CEO of MyNextRun, Emma Huovinen, sees that one trigger for the growth is that the whole running market is changing.
“Running is not just about marathons anymore. People are looking for new, fun ways of being active and getting fitter. Different kinds of running events, like Tough Viking and color runs, are one outcome of this trend,” says Huovinen.
The trend of different running events has been growing in the Nordics already for few years, and MyNextRun wants to support the local event organizers to expand abroad. For this summer, they helped a Finnish event organizer launching their first Color Obstacle -running event in MyNextRun’s biggest growth market, UK. Color Obstacle Rush, arranged June 6th-7th in Windsor, has already been sold out (as 8000 tickets were sold during one week to the event).
“MyNextRun has really helped us with our UK launch. MyNextRun takes care of the online registration and we can focus our energy on organizing the events,” says Jari Malmivaara, a partner of Color Obstacle Races.
Transforming to a more social service
While expanding abroad and finding new partners, MyNextRun wants also to become the number one online community for runners in the future.
“MyNextRun has been a platform mostly for event registration, but we have recognized that there’s a need for social activities around the events. As practicing for running events might be lonely, we want to support building up the community spirit by adding more social elements in MyNextRun.com,” says Huovinen.
