Lance Armstrong Is Now a Venture Capitalist
Lance Armstrong is back in the news, this time for trying his hand as a venture capitalist.
After settling an eight-year, $5 million lawsuit last April-and seeming to close the book on cycling’s biggest doping scandal so far-Armstrong has emerged as a co-founding partner at Next Ventures, an investment firm with a focus on sports, fitness, and wellness tech.
“I believe we’re uniquely positioned, because we get early looks at things and we won’t be fooled on the product side,” Armstrong told CNBC in a December interview. “This is our world, we don’t have to guess.”
Armstrong credited an earlier investment-a $100,000 personal stake in the ride-hailing company Uber-for “saving” his family in the wake of the doping scandal. This foray into tech financing may have sparked his interest in becoming a VC.
On Wednesday, Armsrong’s new firm announced its first investment: PowerDot, an app-based muscle stimulation device that pairs with your smartphone and sends electrical pulses to muscles to help with recovery and strength training. The app, which offers presets for each muscle group, also tracks your data and guides users through pad placement and program selection.
[Find 52 weeks of tips and motivation, with space to fill in your mileage and favorite routes, with the Bicycling Training Journal.]
“We invested in PowerDot because we believe they have the power to bring a highly effective, but previously inaccessible, technology to a much broader market of anyone seeking increased performance, greater recovery, and enhanced overall health,” Armstrong said in a statement.
Essentially, PowerDot is a sleek, consumer-facing take on electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), a process that elicits muscle contractions to help athletes with recovery and performance enhancement. (Physical therapists also use it to treat non-athletes with muscle conditions.) It comes with one pod for $200 or two pods for $300, and is available in red and black.
('You Might Also Like',)
