On July 22, TRNR Co-Founder and CEO Trent Ward sat down with Tom Forte, CFA, Managing Director and Senior TMT Analyst at Maxim Group, for a fireside chat at Maxim’s Virtual Health, Wellness & Longevity Conference. Mr. Forte initiated equity research coverage of TRNR in July 2025 and has maintained it since. Maxim’s conference audience is made up of institutional funds and professional investors, and TRNR now has a positive operating trajectory over many quarters to discuss: record revenue in Q4 2025 and again in Q1 2026, 2026 guidance raised twice this year, and its third acquisition announced in a little over a year. The session was webcast only for Maxim clients, so below we provide highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Tom Forte:
Trent, for investors who are not familiar with it, what in your background makes you suited to lead Interactive Strength?
Trent Ward: I did engineering and finance as an undergraduate, then went into consumer M&A in New York for three years, then spent close to a decade at Citadel on the asset management side as a fundamental long-short portfolio manager, not a trader.
I looked at every kind of business model, allocated capital and made investment decisions. When I was sitting out my non-compete, I ended up going down the entrepreneurial path, and founded FORME in 2015 and 2016, when Peloton was creating the connected fitness category. Since then, there was a lot of disruption in the industry from COVID, then a change in the interest rate cycle, which created a number of opportunities to be an acquirer.
That is what led us to go public and try to roll up a portion of the category. A great deal of capital had been misallocated in connected fitness, and we thought a permanent capital vehicle in the public markets could benefit from that. TRNR is the public market background and the M&A background doing the same job at once.
Can you give a brief overview of the brand portfolio?
FORME is the original company, wall-mounted strength and fitness mirror with coaching. CLMBR, added in February 2024, makes vertical climbing machines. Wattbike, added in July 2025, is the highest performance indoor bike in the world, based in the UK with roughly 18 years of history, used by nearly every NHL team, many NFL and MLB teams and every Premier League club. Ergatta, added in March 2026, is the leader in game-based connected rowing. It is asset-light with high recurring revenue, monthly net retention above 98 percent, and it licenses its games to iFIT across iFIT’s cardio portfolio. STEPR is the category leader in connected stair climbing, paired with US household-name retail distribution. Each brand serves complementary customers, channels and geographies.
Earlier this month you signed a definitive agreement to acquire STEPR. What specifically does it add?
Three things. First, revenue and earnings. The deal is structured at less than four times STEPR’s expected 2027 EBITDA, with most of the consideration contingent on performance. Second, an expansion in our product category with a stair climbing device and a new channel for us. STEPR sells through national sporting goods retail, including Dick’s Sporting Goods, Rogue Fitness, Johnson Fitness and Scheels, which is a channel none of our brands had been in. Third, and this one matters more than people assume, it is the strongest US direct-to-consumer customer acquisition function in the group, plus product development and marketing talent we did not have.
So, we expect STEPR and its team to help increase the value of our existing brands. Wattbike’s market is roughly two-thirds UK. CLMBR and FORME have been primarily commercial. STEPR rounds out the channel mix, and the rest of the portfolio can move through those relationships.
Talk about your earnings power with and without STEPR. What was 2025, and what is guided for 2026?
Reported 2025 revenue was $11.5 million, up 114 percent from $5.4 million in 2024, with an Adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $9.6 million. For 2026, pro forma guidance was more than $30 million before STEPR. With STEPR, guidance is more than $50 million, and the group expects to achieve Adjusted EBITDA profitability in the fourth quarter of 2026 following the close. On a pro forma full year basis we would be close to break even, with the fourth quarter and the periods after it reporting positive Adjusted EBITDA. STEPR adds more scale and it pulls the profitability milestone earlier.
Why have companies decided to sell to you rather than continue alone? And is that repeatable, is the pipeline getting deeper?
It differs by seller. Wattbike came out of Piper Private Equity and Ergatta out of two top-tier venture firms, both at the natural end of a fund life cycle, where a permanent capital vehicle is the right home. STEPR is a different answer. It was bootstrapped, growing quickly and needed working capital. A business doing $10 million to $20 million of revenue and crossing into profitability has very few sources of capital. Institutional money is largely absent from this category and there are not many strategic buyers in it. We fill that gap, and alongside the capital we bring scale and synergy that a business that size cannot build alone.On repeatability, the pipeline is growing and each deal takes less explaining than the one before it. Early on there was more reverse diligence. Sellers – e.g. in the case of Ergatta – sometimes had bankers, a process and other bids, and it was on us to lay out how we get to profitability and why the forward-looking picture was different from the backward-looking one. By the time we got to STEPR, much of that was already visible in reported financials. The practical benefit is selectivity. More opportunities means we say no more often, which raises the bar on what we actually do.
At a high level, how do you structure your deals, and how do you fund them?
A very high percentage of each valuation is paid as contingent equity tied to earnings. That element is sacrosanct for us. Sellers get paid mostly if the business performs after closing, and the equity is locked up for extended periods. This limits cash outlay, it limits near-term dilution, and it aligns sellers with our shareholders. The point of the structure is to fix the earnings multiple rather than the price, so we are not taking valuation risk if earnings come in below expectations. I do not want a zero-sum negotiation where they push the price up and we push it down. I want a multiple we both agree is fair, so that targets are strongly incentivized to deliver the earnings. Funding is deal-dependent. Equity is the better currency for us at the moment, and that will change. Over time we expect to choose the currency, which also widens the universe of what we can buy.
What actually happens in the first 90 days after you add a company to the group?
It is bespoke to each deal, and what we can extract has grown as we have. E.g., Wattbike was losing a little money when we bought it. We restructured it, took out cost, made it profitable and then capitalized it to grow. A couple of our senior people came out of the private equity industry and so that is part of the playbook we run. Ergatta was the opposite case. Cash flow positive, sticky subscriber base, not much to do beyond optimizing, and the team is largely intact. With STEPR, right after we signed, the founders spent three days with us at an offsite working through where we can grow together. In aggregate, across all those businesses, you start to see the makings of an operating group with distinct brands rather than a holding company of separate businesses. We still do both, because there are brands where independence is worth more than integration. What matters is deciding quickly and setting the tone.
Why are these brands worth more inside TRNR than on their own?
Shared retail distribution, shared manufacturing and logistics scale, cross-selling into commercial accounts, and one public-company cost base spread across five brands instead of each brand having their own separate one. Those are real dollars and they are the justification for the structure. Wattbike is the clearest example. Great brand, 18 years of history, and relatively unknown outside the UK, in a US market that is several times larger. For Wattbike to build a US direct-to-consumer team and develop the brand on its own is a multi-year effort that takes real capital. Using the STEPR team, which is already here with the channel relationships in place, should make that go faster and be less inexpensive.
How do you think about capital allocation, the next acquisition versus paying down debt versus investing in the brands you own?
Everything comes back to return on capital, and not just the absolute return. Time to payback and risk matter as much. A certain 20 percent is better than an uncertain 30 percent, and a near-term payback is worth more than a longer-dated one. So it is a ranking exercise across our portfolio of opportunities. When we have attractive opportunities that exceed our existing capital, we have the ability to access the market to pursue them. The advantage of a portfolio is that the ranking is possible at all. With one product and one brand you run the same playbook regardless, and you make worse decisions for it – that’s a man-with-a-hammer logic, where everything looks like a nail. With five brands you can weigh consumer against commercial, online against retail, US against Europe, and put the incremental dollar where the return is highest.
What does the group P&L look like at scale?
The individual brands generate between 15 and 30 percent EBITDA margins as they achieve some scale or their costs are right-sized. This is not guidance yet, but directionally, I think we could expect close to 10 percent Adjusted EBITDA margin at the group level next year on more than $50 million of revenue. We expect that a $100 million revenue business with $15 million to $20 million of EBITDA is achievable in the midterm through organic growth, group-level cost savings and another acquisition or two. So, you can see the upside we have as we grow the top-line and get leverage on our fixed cost base.
Last question. What is Wall Street missing on TRNR?
Two things. The embedded revenue and the earnings growth.
The acquisitions already signed or closed take the group from $11.5 million reported in 2025 to more than $50 million of pro forma revenue guidance, before any new deals. And the structural accretion in how those deals are built, mostly in locked-up, performance-contingent equity at attractive multiples. Investors are busy, and a lot of our register is retail, so I do not assume everyone has modeled it out. Our job is not just to keep saying it. It is to print the quarters that prove it – that’s when retail starts to take notice and to believe in the hidden equity value in the company. I would like to reach a point in the next year where the deals we have done are demonstrated to be a good allocation of capital, so that the next deal announcement is understood as value creation on its face. The gap between that trajectory and the share price is the opportunity. I think it’s reasonable to assume we will add one or two acquisitions a year in order to achieve more scale faster.
For more commentary, information and details of TRNR’s strategy, as well as to sign up for direct updates, see the Company’s investor website, latest FAQs and required filings with the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Questions can be sent to ir@interactivestrength.com. This post is a summary of a live discussion, edited for length and clarity, and includes forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties. See TRNR’s SEC filings for additional risk factors.