HYROX Founders Invest in XENOM and Form Strategic Partnership

London, UK, 7 October 2026 - XENOM, The Decathlon of Fitness™, today announces that HYROX founders Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fürste have invested in XENOM and joined its board of directors. Alongside the investment, XENOM and HYROX have formed a strategic partnership spanning marketing, event activation and education, in pursuit of a shared goal: making fitness the largest sport on earth. The partnership comes as XENOM prepares for its first full international season in 2027, following its inaugural 2026 competitions in Dallas, London Miami and Malaga.

Toetzke and Fürste have worked with XENOM Founder and CEO Keith Barlow since 2020, and bring the experience of building HYROX into one of the world's largest mass-participation fitness competitions. They join a board that includes WNDR, the investment firm led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa, which led XENOM's $15 million seed round.

Together, HYROX and XENOM now span the full functional fitness competitive landscape, from the world's biggest mass-participation race to its most complete test. Both recognise how fitness has become a cultural force, a sport people train for all year and a live experience they travel to compete in and to watch.

Christian Toetzke, Founder of HYROX, states, "We have always believed that fitness had the potential to become one of the largest sports in the world, and the growth of HYROX over the past decade has shown that millions of people will train all year for a standardised competition and travel across the world to take part in it. XENOM completes that picture with a standardised test of total fitness, including the strength and gymnastics disciplines that a huge global community prioritises in their training but has never had a global competition built around. We have worked with Keith since 2020, and joining him on this journey was a very logical decision for us, because we share the same goal of making fitness the largest sport on earth."

Moritz Fürste, co-founder of HYROX and Olympic gold medalist said, "I've been involved in two sports at a global level, field hockey as an athlete, HYROX as a co-founder, and now XENOM as the third. Across all of them, the same principles apply. If you create a format designed specifically for a large community of people, one that speaks to their passions, and you execute it at the highest level, you can build something special. Over the past decade we've driven the growth of one of the first truly new sports. XENOM follows the same logic, for a community that has never had its own global competition and we see the same scale in it."

Keith Barlow, CEO of XENOM, said: "You can't overstate how beneficial it is to have this group of people around you when you're building something of this ambition. Christian and Mo have taken fitness events into more markets than anyone in this sport, and their experience, alongside the backing of investors like WNDR, means we can invest in and establish the infrastructure for a global events system from day one, rather than learning each market the hard way. We see an incredible opportunity to meet the huge unmet demand from people training in boxes, garages and gyms around the world, who have been waiting for a complete, standardised test of their fitness — and to build XENOM into the defining global platform for the pursuit of total performance."

What is XENOM:

XENOM is The Decathlon of Fitness™, a stadium-scale global competition series built around 10 fixed, standardised events that test maximal strength, gymnastics, and aerobic capacity using an objective, point-based scoring system (The Elite Performance Index). By utilising the exact same competition structure at every event worldwide, XENOM provides a repeatable global benchmark designed for functional fitness athletes, weightlifters, and competitive gym-goers across all experience levels—offering Elite, RX, and accessible Compete divisions to let every athlete test their limits on the world stage.

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