Investor brief · July 2026
The community growth platform for grassroots communities.
Every grassroots community runs on the unpaid work of a handful of people who eventually burn out. WEVE helps run clubs and local communities track participation, recognize contributions, and turn casual attendees into committed members.
Live in production at strideandrise.com. Stride & Rise, our flagship Austin run club, is the first live community powered by WEVE. Three outside clubs actively onboarding from the waitlist.
Live numbers from the production database. Updated every 5 minutes.
Why now
Grassroots community is back. The tooling isn’t.
Running participation has hit record highs post-2023. Run clubs in major US cities are growing 30–80% year over year. Civic membership has been in long decline since Bowling Alone — grassroots fitness clubs are one of the few in-person communities still growing in its place.
And yet: every one of these clubs runs on a group chat and a spreadsheet. There is no source of truth for who showed up, who hosted, who brought a friend, who took the recap photos. Recognition is informal, contribution is invisible, and the same three people burn out.
WEVE is the contribution layer those clubs need. Every action a member takes is logged, recognized, and converted into a visible, contribution-weighted share of the club (recognition, not legal equity). The leaderboard makes the invisible work visible. The tier system gives the work tangible rewards.
Market
$1.5B TAM, bottoms-up.
Run clubs are the wedge — a $85M bottoms-up TAM (3M global run clubs × 10% paid conversion × $23/mo blended ARPU). The same contribution loop extends to fitness clubs ($300M) and the broader category of recurring in-person groups — book clubs, makerspaces, cycling clubs, neighborhood groups — we collectively call culture clubs ($1.1B).
Three tailwinds compound the opportunity: loneliness is now a consumer-grade problem (30% of US adults feel lonely weekly), Gen Z has made fitness a top-tier life priority (56% rate it “very high”, vs. 40% of US consumers overall), and digital-native communities are moving offline (73% of 18–35-year-olds plan to attend live events in the next 6 months; 95% want to explore online interests through in-person events).
Sources: Industry Research, American Psychiatric Association, McKinsey & Co., Eventbrite, Strava Clubs, Statista, Pew Research, IHRSA.
Product
Multi-tenant, mobile-first, in production today.
Every club gets its own page at strideandrise.com/c/[slug]: member directory, event calendar, check-in flow, contribution log, ownership ledger, and a gated perks system.
The core member loop is one tap: show up → check in → log a contribution → climb the leaderboard → unlock the next tier.The founder loop is one dashboard: events, members, broadcasts, contribution types, and tier rewards.
Stack: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Supabase Postgres with row-level security, Resend for transactional and broadcast email, Vercel for hosting. Multi-tenant by design — every query is scoped by community_id and enforced by RLS policies and tenant-integrity triggers.
Traction
From 19 in the rain to a live platform in 15 months.
Milestones
Business model
Prove retention first. Charge second.
Waitlist-only access for hand-picked clubs while we prove retention and weekly activity. The goal of Phase 1 is product-market evidence, not revenue. Pricing model and timing TBD after first-cohort data.
Once retention is proven, introduce a per-club monthly subscription. Founders pay because the platform is replacing a job they were doing for free — recognition, attendance, contribution tracking, perks.
Vision & moat
A new category: community contribution.
The defensible asset is the contribution data. Every logged contribution compounds the network: the recommendation engine for new clubs gets smarter, brand-matching for perks gets cleaner, and the ledger itself becomes a credential — a verifiable record of who actually built the things you participate in.
Closest analogs: GitHub for code contribution, Strava for athletic activity. WEVE is the equivalent for community contribution — and nobody else is building it.
Team
Three founders. Six years of trust. No friction.
Built together since 2020 through college at Northeastern University. High-trust, fast-moving, no friction. One who lives the mission, one who knows how platforms scale, and one who makes community feel like home.
Software engineer at Visa Secure on 3D Secure auth infrastructure; prior SWE at Asics. Built the WEVE platform (live at strideandrise.com) on Next.js + Supabase. Grew Stride & Rise, the Austin run club, from 19 to 221 members with $0. Content creator and community builder in one.
Consumer Technology Investment Banking at Wells Fargo. Transactions include Bending Spoons’ acquisition of AOL & Vimeo, and supporting several ongoing Consumer AI IPOs. Past roles at a Series B startup, startup investment bank, and private equity.
Product Designer at Tank Design. Led end-to-end design for Princess Cruises, Fidelity, Boston Globe, and Hilton. High-velocity shipping in scalable UI systems, illustration libraries, motion graphics, and design systems.
Where we are
Pre-seed. Early conversations only.
The goal of Phase 1 is evidence — retention, weekly activity, and the three clubs now onboarding from the waitlist as the first outside cohort. We’d rather shape a round around real data than around assumptions, so size and structure will follow the cohort, not the other way around.
Most useful to talk to: investors and operators who’ve built community-led products, IRL networks, marketplaces, or lifestyle brands — people with real conviction in grassroots community as a category. If that’s you, reach out below.
Contact
[email protected] · Clayton Yan, Technical Founder & CEO
Austin, one year of Stride & Rise.