Estonian running app KULG raises €100,000 in pre-seed funding

The mobile app KULG, which helps runners achieve long-term and sustainable progress with personalized training recommendations, has raised 100 thousand euros in pre-seed funding. With this investment, early investors have committed a total of 120 thousand euros to the Estonian startup in 2025. With the support of this funding, KULG will grow its engineering and AI teams, accelerate product development with new features, integrations, and mobile apps, and expand into new markets. KULG participated in the Tehnopol Startup Incubator’s accelerator programme.

The anchor investor of the funding round is a well-known, anonymous angel investor with decades of experience in technology and product scaling, combined with a passion for endurance sports. “We’ve been incredibly fortunate to bring on board an early investor who not only understands the problem we’re solving but also supports us in building the solution for runners in a highly competitive space,” said Maris Heinaru, KULG CEO and founder. Heinaru is a certified running coach, a marathon runner for 16 years, and currently holds the Estonian women’s age-group marathon record.

“Thanks to KULG app, my coach has a real-time 24/7 overview of my training. This helped me prepare much better for the recently held Tallinn Marathon and achieve a podium spot (bronze),” said runner Marek Truumaa. He added: “I’ve started monitoring the volume of my high-intensity training sessions and keeping them close to the recommended 20% of my weekly total. In KULG, this is very easy to track. As a result, I can now handle significantly higher training loads than before.”

Despite the abundance of data and the availability of digitally generated training plans, more than half of runners suffer injuries each year, largely due to preventable training mistakes. KULG aims to turn data into personalized, science-backed training recommendations and help runners collaborate better with their coaches.

“It’s well known that many failures and running injuries are caused by poorly structured training loads and insufficient recovery. If KULG can help support this balance in a personal and science-based way, it could be very useful for runners,” commented Jarek Mäestu, Professor of Human Movement and Exercise Biology at the University of Tartu.

KULG was founded in December 2023 and is already publicly available on both web and mobile. More than 550 runners, coaches, and running clubs have tested the app. The six-person team has previous experience from Estonian technology companies such as Pipedrive, Monese, and Wise. KULG’s co-founders, Henri Taube and Jevgeni Striganov, lead the company’s technology and design.

There are an estimated 680 million recreational runners worldwide, and according to the running app Strava, running is the fastest-growing sport globally. KULG is designed for runners who train with a specific goal and want to go beyond merely tracking and sharing their runs socially – to understand how to achieve their best results through consistent, sustainable, long-term training.

KULG running app collects training and recovery data from wearables, identifies individual patterns and long-term trends, and turns fragmented data into personalized training guidance. The company’s mission is to help runners balance effort and recovery, reach their goals, and avoid injuries or other setbacks.

Photo by Sadu-Triste Juurikas