Kotcha – a Training App, Cofounded by Eliud Kipchoge and Kilian Jornet

This explains Kilian’s teaser on IG about some form of collab with Eliud in the lead up to WSER. From the app’s ‘story’ page:

At Kotcha, we have an obsession: the science and craft behind elite running. How a season is structured, how effort is rationed across months so the body adapts instead of breaking, how strength work and recovery quietly do as much as the hard sessions, how discipline compounds, day after day, into performance. These are the decisions that separate the best in the world from everyone chasing them.

That’s why Kilian Jornet and Eliud Kipchoge are athlete-founders. The greatest mountain runner and the greatest marathoner of all time sat down to build the product with us, opening up the real logic behind their training: why a given week looks the way it does, when to push and when to hold back, how a plan bends to the runner instead of the other way around. We take that logic, distill it and translate it into a plan that adapts to you: your level, your goal, your life.

These days the word ‘founder’ is stretched into interesting terrain. I don’t believe Kilian and Eliud were just text messaging each other debating in which ones’ garage they should build their first prototypes. They are brought into the project by an experienced team of app builders and marketers with the goal to give the app some celebrity cache. And in lieu of endorsement fees – startups often don’t have that cash laying around – they are being offering equity shares into the company at ground level does earning themselves the title of ‘founder’ – which in turn adds even more credibility to the app.

Is the app any good? Who knows. I’m not the target market for this, maybe DCRainmaker will take it for a spin? Or maybe I will get a chance to chat with the folks behind it at TrailCon? Kotcha seems to certainly be aimed at the folks who are looking for a AI powered training app with celebrity endorsement.

Add this one to the growing bucket of ‘tech entering the trail running space’.

Lastly I’m just gonna note that Kilian is extremely good at using Western States especially to launch and market his products and businesses.