Wahoo CEO talks finances, artificial intelligence and the company's 'next big opportunity'

Wahoo Fitness has returned to year on year growth following its recapitalisation in 2023, CEO Gareth Joyce has revealed.

Speaking exclusively to Cyclingnews, Joyce opened up on a broad range of subjects, including why it took so long to update the Kickr Core despite growing the Kickr to its sixth iteration, why it launched a treadmill, the reasoning behind its partnership with Coros, and why 2038 is going to be a heck of a busy year.

He outlined a business very much with cycling still at its centre, but explained that running taking increasing amounts of importance. And he explained that there’s a busy product roadmap ahead, with "seven or eight" launches in the pipeline for 2027 following a year spent reorganising development

Joyce, an engineer and keen cyclist and runner who joined Wahoo in 2024, had never worked in the bike industry before and admits he wasn’t an obvious candidate for the CEO role, but that his then-recent experience talking a company through Chapter 11 bankruptcy made him perfectly qualified given Wahoo’s financial turbulence at the time.

He sees his role as bringing a sense of corporate structure to a startup business. He explained that Wahoo’s foundations were built on innovation, but its scale no longer supports that model of working.

"It’s no longer just a startup," he said. "We’ve got a large customer base that you have a responsibility to."

Asked whether the changes following Wahoo’s recapitalisation are working, Joyce’s answer was pretty conclusive.

"We’ve had very strong growth coming out of that," he said. "We have a great brand, great product, very committed customer base, and there were some things we needed to fix in the business which we paid attention to early on.

"We’ve seen growth year over year in all of the years since the recapitalisation, and I expect this year to be the same."

Naturally, he declined to provide any actual figures, so the extent of Wahoo’s profitability will have to remain unknown, but he affirmed that key "operational changes" are key to the business’s newfound momentum.

Among those changes was burying the hatchet with Zwift, with whom Wahoo was in a year-long lawsuit, after Wahoo claimed the Zwift Hub smart trainer infringed on its patents.

"If we work together, we can grow the industry," he said. "That was what Eric [Min, Zwift co-founder and CEO] and I set out to achieve."

The ball had already begun rolling on this before Joyce’s appointment. The lawsuit was settled in September 2023, the Kickr Core Zwift One launched in March 2024, and Joyce was appointed in April. But he says working with Zwift - and other brands - is now central to how Wahoo should expand. An example of this includes Wahoo’s partnership with competitor brand Coros.

Product plans and clearer priorities

Joyce argued that Wahoo’s innovation and its ability to come up with good ideas can make it difficult to decide which to pursue.

"You tend to become a little chaotic with your product strategy because every idea is a good idea," he said. "When you try and make every product that you think is a good idea, you end up distributing your resources and a distributed focus."

His solution to this was to revisit the company’s mission of "building the better athlete in all of us" and judge product ideas against it. Cycling remained – and still remains – the foundation, with indoor trainers, GPS computers and surrounding accessories supplying the data an athlete needs, but this is underpinned by software. The new Wahoo app was quietly rolled out this year, after a long period of beta testing.

The revised strategy also meant an overhaul of its product launch cycles, which explains some of the recent quiet on the launch front.

"This year was a pretty lean year of releases for us, which was by design," Joyce explained. "Last year, when we kind of reset the product strategy, we then had to reset the engineering program."

He expects the results to become more visible in 2027.

"Next year we have a pretty healthy set of product launches. I think we have seven or eight in the pipeline," he says. "I’m currently testing three of them as we speak. In fact, some of them are lying on my desk."

Unfortunately he turned down my invite for a game of show and tell, despite me awkwardly presenting the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt 2 that was lying on my desk.

Iterative development

Alongside that reset is a longer-term change to Wahoo’s product cycles and release cadence.

I asked why the Kickr Core went from 2018 to 2025 without any update, while the flagship Kickr trainer grew to its sixth iteration – seven if you count the Kickr Move.

"There was no rational reason for that replacement cadence," Joyce conceded. "The market was not demanding changes that quickly."

Wahoo is now working around different cycles for different categories: roughly three years for bike computers, four for indoor trainers, and six for heart rate monitors and treadmills.

I joked that he’s going to have a busy 2038 when those cycles overlap in their 12th year, to which he was keen to re-emphasise the use of the word "roughly" and affirmed that those are loose assumptions, rather than a fixed calendar.

The slowed approach also reflects his view on indoor cycling, and the slowing nature of the technology’s innovation.

"I think it’s now entering that phase of iterative development rather than disruptive technology," he said. "That’s not to say it’ll never happen, but just right now, there’s not something that we see on the horizon of, let’s say, five years, that would be disruptive in nature."

He immediately qualified that by adding "that doesn’t mean we’ve thought of everything."

A move into running

Wahoo didn’t cut its teeth in running, but in 2024, Wahoo launched a treadmill known as the Kickr Run. As Joyce explains, the plan was to take the formula that saw Wahoo transform indoor cycling, and apply it to another sport.

It’s not quite had the same uptake in the 2.5 years since it launched as the smart trainer, but nevertheless Joyce sees it as an important growth category, and one where there’s plenty of opportunity for innovation and disruption.

"Treadmills, for a very long time, have been terrible products," he says.

And to that end, the Coros partnership adds weight to Wahoo’s move into running, but also demonstrates where Joyce believes Wahoo should avoid spreading itself thin.

The Elemnt Rival smartwatch can’t hold a candle to the quality of launches from market leader Garmin, nor can Wahoo keep up with their annual release cycle. Instead, rather than invest in a complete watch range to compete directly, it chose to work with Coros.

"To develop multiple SKUs is a very big investment, takes a lot of time, and would distract our attention from the rest of the strategy," he explained.

The goal is to provide access to products for cycling and running, indoors and outdoors, developing those products in house where possible, and partnering with others where not.

Connecting indoor and outdoor training

Joyce recognises that many of its customers aren’t exclusively doing one sport, nor are they only doing it indoors or out.

"That boundary is no longer in and out of your house. It’s just cycling," he explained.

And that’s where the Wahoo software offering comes into play. Wahoo has had multiple apps running concurrently for years, one controlling hardware and another providing training solutions, and Joyce is relieved at the recent consolidation.

"If our mission is building the better athlete in all of us, and I can’t tell you whether you’re becoming a better athlete or not, then it’s kind of hard to make that brand play."

If he can reduce the number of apps, or streamline the way in which the heart rate monitor, GPS computer and smart trainer all talk to third party suppliers, efficiencies can be found.

Two approaches to artificial intelligence

When asked about AI, Joyce separated Wahoo’s use of the fast-growing tech into two buckets: internally, how the brand uses it day to day, and externally, i.e. what AI integration might offer customers. Within the business, AI is already used extensively across software, firmware and hardware engineering.

"We’ve seen significant acceleration in our development cycles of products, particularly software," he said, pointing to faster app updates as one example.

He also said AI is being leveraged to help his Customer Service team resolve issues more quickly, while remaining entirely human.

However, for consumer-facing features, such as the AI Coach revealed by Zwift this week, or the AI-based adaptive training used by TrainerRoad, Joyce is more cautious. He believes customers may prefer to use AI services they already pay for, whether that’s the aforementioned, or a direct account with Claude or Chat GPT.

Voicing that customer’s perspective, he said: "I don’t want five licences for AI accounts. I want you to be able to pass me the data where I want it."

That helps explain why Wahoo has yet to commit to a consumer AI offering, despite the fast pace of the industry. Where Joyce does see an opportunity, however, is in Wahoo’s enormous database of accumulated workout data.

"We have records of workout data that goes back over a decade. We have the capability to translate that data into meaning, which is the next big opportunity we see, which we’re now starting to work on using machine learning and AI."

And for that database of workout data, Joyce’s data is as prevalent as any others.

"I love cycling. I love my running. To be able to go out on a Saturday and do a long ride and test stuff... yes, you could technically say that’s work, but for me it’s not."

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