Endurance Event Marketplace ‘Let’s Do This’ Races To $15M Series A

Alright, couch potato. It’s time to peel your keister off the cushions and get moving.

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Let’s be honest: working out can be kind of a drag. You get all hot and sweaty. It can hurt a little. And, it can be difficult, due in no small part to the sheer physicality of it all. But the mental and emotional side is real too. After all, you’re confronted with your own limitations, that you’re more like a rickety old house cat than a svelte, powerful puma.

A lot of us want to become powerful pumas, and the best way to get there is together.

Group fitness events such as obstacle races, 5k runs, triathlons, and the like can be a ton of fun. Finding those events though? Not so much, until relatively recently.

Founded in 2017, Let’s Do This is a startup with two homes: one in San Francisco and the other in London. The company builds a listing service for organizers of group endurance events to post their races and operates a listing service to give would-be participants a way to pay their entry fees and secure a spot on the starting line. In early September, the company announced that it raised $5 million in a seed round (which Crunchbase News covered in our column Last Week In Venture).

Today, a little over two months later, the company announced it secured $15 million in Series A funding. Stockholm, Sweden-based EQT Ventures led the deal, in which prior investors NFX (leader of that September seed round) and Y Combinator participated. As part of the terms of the transaction, EQT Ventures partner Lyle Fong will join the company’s board.

Let’s Do This currently lists over 30,000 races of varying distances and disciplines on its platform. For each race, the company lists important information like a map of the racecourse, a short description of the terrain, charts of elevation changes over the race course, and details related to race day logistics. People can then book and pay for their spot. In the event of injury or a training roadblock, people who booked through Let’s Do This are offered free cancellation protection for most races on the platform.

The company’s goals are ambitious. They want to “[inspire] more epic experiences than any other community on the planet,” making the world a happier, healthier place, according to their CEO Sam Browne. And they may yet achieve that mission. The company says that “People are 12.5 times more likely to develop a fitness habit after 12 months from signing up to a race than from joining a gym.” If that translates to customer loyalty, Let’s Do This, as a business, is off to the races.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias