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The Billion Dollar Fitness Company That Recruited LeBron James

October 14, 2021

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Hey Friends,

At-home fitness company Tonal has a fantastic story.

Aly Orady worked as an engineer at some of the best companies in the world over the last two decades — Samsung, Sun Microsystems, HP, and more — but the morning after Christmas in 2013, he woke up feeling miserable.

Orady says he was overweight and had developed Type II diabetes and sleep apnea.

“It felt like I was heading toward this point of no return, and I just wasn’t going to be able to reclaim my health if I didn’t do something about it,” Orady told TechCrunch.

So, looking to make a change, Orady took back control of his life. He scaled down his work schedule and committed to an ambitious workout schedule and diet plan.

Aly Orady’s Workout & Diet

  • Four hours of exercise per day

  • Workout 6x per week

  • Split workouts between morning & night

  • Intermittent fasting 2x per week

The ability to commit to a detailed workout & diet enabled Orady to see life-changing results, losing a total of 70 pounds over nine months in 2014.

But like all great entrepreneurs, Orady saw a problem and wanted to fix it.

Most days, Orady would wake up at 6 a.m. and drive to a Gold’s Gym in San Francisco to lift weights. He didn’t mind the workouts, but he hated the drive. So why couldn’t he do strength workouts at home?

Home cardio machines were plentiful, but if you wanted to work on strength, a 7-foot Bowflex or cable crossover machine was probably your best option.

“I was looking at this thing, and I realized the reason this thing was so big was because it relied on big metal plates and gravity to work. I thought to myself, if I could replace those big metal plates and gravity with electricity, I could shrink it down and create something really small,” Orady told TechCrunch.

That’s when Tonal was born.

The company was initially called Ript Labs, later changing its name to Tonal. Still, the mission remained the same: to replace bulky equipment and weights with a smaller at-home weight training device that used electricity & electromagnets to generate force.

The idea seemed wild at first, and Orady spent more than a year developing his original prototype, eventually convincing a few venture capital firms to make a $1.5 million investment into the company.

Fast forward six years, and Tonal has become one of the greatest success stories in the fitness industry. They’ve raised more than $400 million, are currently valued at roughly $1.6 billion, and have built a cap table that includes some of the world’s greatest athletes.

Tonal’s Athlete Investors

  • Stephen Curry

  • Serena Williams

  • Drew Brees

  • Klay Thompson

  • Paul George

  • Maria Sharapova

  • Michelle Wie

  • Bobby Wagner

  • Mike Tyson

  • Sue Bird

  • Rudy Gay

  • Tony Gonzalez

With $400 million in funding and an impressive list of athlete investors helping to market the product through their extensive distribution channels, Tonal has grown tremendously.

  • Tonal owns over 90% of the connect strength category

  • Sales have increased 800% during the pandemic

  • Hundreds of professional athletes are using the product

  • A partnership with Nordstrom will bring Tonal to stores nationwide

  • Tonal currently has nearly 20 retail locations of their own

Even better, they just landed LeBron James.

Tonal announced yesterday that LeBron James has invested in the company and will assume an active role in marketing, product development, and social content creation.

The financial details of LeBron’s investment weren’t disclosed, but I imagine it is significant. LeBron gets presented a million different opportunities and has publicly stated he now only entertains deals that can really move the needle financially.

Maybe he received a valuation discount on the investment, or maybe he is taking a marketing fee in return. Still, regardless, with an IPO already being discussed, this might have been LeBron’s last chance to acquire Tonal equity before the public.

We’ll see how it goes. The business has already found product-market fit and has benefited from a strong pandemic tailwind. It will be interesting to see how a global superstar like Lebron James can further accelerate that.

I hope each of you has a great day, and I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.

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Huddle Up is a daily letter that breaks down the business and money behind sports.

Join more than 48,000 professional athletes, business executives, and casual sports fans that receive it directly in their inbox each morning — it’s free.

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