Bending Spoons Made Komoot Better. Will It Be Enough?
Eighteen months after the acquisition, the outdoor navigation platform is better than many expected. Is anyone still there to notice?
The old hero image from Komoot’s homepage: friends enjoying a break. Looking back, that says a lot about Komoot
“Training season's over”
Dua Lipa
When Bending Spoons acquires a company, longtime users tend to assume they know what comes next: deep staff cuts, tighter operations, a rebuilt product, and higher prices designed to extract more value from the user base.
When that company runs a community-powered product with local network effects, things get more personal. This is what happened to Komoot in late March 2025. The Germany-based company built loyalty not only through route planning, but through a collaborative promise: the platform became more useful because people contributed routes, photos, Highlights, and local knowledge. Users expected that promise to last.
The sale therefore felt like more than a financial transaction. Komoot’s founders had repeatedly suggested they would not sell, and longtime employees told Escape Collective they had been blindsided by the announcement. Around 80% of the workforce was reportedly let go soon afterwards. The ownership changed. So did the perceived psychological contract between the platform and the people who had helped build its value.
That matters because in a community-powered platform, contributor trust is not sentimental decoration. It is part of the product system.
The reactions were bleak, to say the least. The language felt like a funeral. Even if we ignore the outrage on Reddit, forums, and social media entirely, the headlines tell the story:
When We Get Commuted - Bikepacking.com
Komoot Acquired: History Says This Won’t End Well - DC Rainmaker
How Komoot Lost Its Way - Escape Collective
Komoot Enshittification Incoming - Canion dot Blog
“What comes of Komoot as a platform going forward remains pretty unclear”, wrote DC Rainmaker a few weeks later. “Though what’s clear is that when you fire 85% of the employees, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to see substantial new features going forward.”
I was one of those active community members. I have been riding bikes for as long as I can remember, and I have used Komoot since I bought my first gravel bike in 2020. Anyone who rides with me knows how many photos of the road I take. I upload them so that the next rider can plan with greater confidence (on a gravel ride, that can save your day). A small contribution cost for me. Less uncertainty for someone I will probably never meet.
The acquisition hit close to home. I chose not to panic, but to wait and see.
Digital product strategy also happens to be my job and the focus of much of my thinking. So this is my assessment after eighteen months of using the post-acquisition Komoot as intensively as ever. I have no inside information, and I did not go looking for any. I wanted to understand the change from the outside, as a user who knows what product systems look like from the inside.
Let me begin by saying that most of the predictions got one important thing wrong: the post-acquisition Komoot is a much better product.
This Is the Best Komoot Yet
In usability, information architecture, feature discoverability, and release cadence, the new Komoot is far ahead of the version it replaced. The Bending Spoons transformation playbook is in full swing and, from an execution standpoint, it is glorious.
The change is visible across the product. The core experience has been redesigned around clearer planning, discovery, and search. The team says the work was informed by 110 interviews and more than 3,000 survey responses. In five months, it shipped more than 50 updates across web, mobile, and connected devices. It released a new Apple Watch app, expanded Garmin and Wahoo integrations, introduced AI-assisted tour discovery, and made product updates unusually visible inside the app.
Even the operating rhythm feels different. The team is communicating more often, showing work in progress, and meeting customers in places where established product organisations rarely show up, including Reddit. The distance between the product team and its users feels shorter.
This is what Bending Spoons does at remarkable speed: acquire, simplify, redesign, integrate, and ship. We should be honest about what is in front of us. The roadmap is moving faster than it used to. This is not what product neglect looks like. It is what a coherent playbook looks like.
The problem is that the software has always been the least interesting part of Komoot.
Komoot Was Never Just a Route Planner
Let’s be honest: before the acquisition, Komoot was useful but frustrating. I feel bad putting it that way, because I know how much work goes into digital platforms and how reductive it can be to judge one solely through the lens of the average user. But however useful the planning features were, the rest of the experience lagged behind. The social features were clumsy. Being “Komooted” even became a verb on social media for being sent down the most unrideable path imaginable.
And yet we stayed. That is the first clue.
We did not choose Komoot for its interface. We chose it because its differentiated utility was strong enough to compensate for the friction. Its real advantage lived in a compounding loop: people explored, completed routes, and contributed photos, Highlights, warnings, and local knowledge; those contributions reduced uncertainty for the next person; better planning produced more successful adventures and more opportunities to contribute.
The map was software. The knowledge on top of it was the moat.
This was how I defended Komoot to friends on Strava: “Strava ranks you. Komoot routes you. I don’t need a place where I’m constantly competing with everyone else. I need a place to plan my adventures that feels like a grassroots community. That’s why Komoot is my place.”
Me riding my gravel bike, because it’s still better than an AI-generated picture.
The problem is that, in cycling and running at least, the community appears to be thinning out. I cannot prove that with platform-wide data. I can only report what I see: almost all the cyclists, runners, and creators I used to follow have stopped posting there. That is anecdotal, but the loss of relevant network density is hard to miss. Even Komoot's own social posts often generate surprisingly little engagement.
Relevant is the key word. Network effects do not disappear everywhere at once. They are local to a sport, a geography, and a social graph. Komoot may still be healthy in hiking, which the company says is practised by 58% of its community. Gravel, performance cycling, and running can tell a different story. A network can be enormous on a slide and feel empty on the roads you ride.
Strava’s social reward loop
Activity → visibility → feedback → identity reinforcement → next activity.
A solitary effort becomes a social, competitive experience.
VS
Komoot’s knowledge loop
Exploration → route completion → contribution → reduced uncertainty → better future exploration.
A solitary route becomes shared outdoor knowledge.
Strava’s advantage is not simply that it has more features. Route planning, maps, training, clubs, events, segments, performance analysis, and conversations all share one identity, one activity history, one social graph, and one habitual destination. That creates suite gravity. It reduces the marginal reason to open another app.
Komoot can still produce the better route. But Strava does not need to beat it feature by feature. Its planning only needs to cross the good-enough threshold. Once it does, the network does the rest.
“How much better must Komoot be at planning to justify leaving the place where your sporting identity already lives? ”
Perhaps that is not even the right question. If Komoot helps me plan a ride that I eventually publish on Strava, something more important is happening: Komoot produces the utility while Strava captures the social reward. The activity begins in one product and compounds in another. The loop is leaking.
Every improvement can therefore make Komoot more polished without necessarily making it more defensible. Bending Spoons is visibly improving the interface through which users access value. The open question is whether enough users still have a reason to add to it.
So perhaps the real product question is this: can Komoot maintain a community-powered contributor loop without adopting Strava’s attention-driven social model?
There’s a Hole in the Playbook
Komoot may face an unusual strategic problem: it is a better product sitting on top of a loop that may be weakening in some of its most visible user segments.
This is also where monetisation becomes more than a pricing question. In a network product, the placement of a paywall can create an externality. It may increase revenue per converted user while reducing the participation that creates value for everyone else.
The clearest example sits in the critical journey between planning a route and riding it. On 27 February 2025, before the acquisition was announced, Komoot suddenly changed its policy for sending routes to third-party devices (Garmin, Wahoo, Suunto, etc). New users needed Premium, while existing customers who had already purchased a map product were grandfathered in. This was not a minor change: you are charging the user to go from planning a route to riding it.
My feeling is that Bending Spoons is well aware of the risk, because the current model is less restrictive: according to Komoot’s plan comparison, Maps remain one-time purchases and include sending routes to external devices and live sync to Garmin. Premium adds features such as worldwide access, multi-day planning, live tracking, weather, sport-specific overlays, 3D maps, and Komoot’s own map on Garmin devices.
That looks like a sensible correction. It protects a key activation path instead of forcing every new user through a subscription gate. It also respects legacy customers like me, who unlocked all the maps (aka the World Pack) years ago and can still use the product much as before.
But the episode reveals the underlying trade-off. A product like Komoot needs a monetisation boundary that captures enough value to sustain the business without taxing the behaviours that feed the network. Plan a route. Send it to a device. Complete it. Contribute something useful. Each step creates the conditions for the next one.
Put too much friction in that sequence and the damage is not limited to conversion. Fewer routes completed through Komoot mean fewer opportunities to bring fresh photos, surface information, notes, and warnings back into the platform. Coverage grows more slowly. The specialist advantage narrows. A good-enough alternative becomes easier to choose.
The challenge is not to copy Strava. Komoot does not need more performance anxiety, more leaderboards, or another feed optimised for attention. It needs a contribution system that fits its own identity: recognition for local expertise, visible evidence that a photo or Highlight helped someone, and better reasons to return after the route is over. Community-powered does not have to be socially performative.
“This is why Komoot deserves attention within the Bending Spoons portfolio: a centralised transformation playbook is well suited to rebuilding software. A community is different. ”
I know a publicly traded company (BSP) has to show growth at scale. But headline community size would not tell us whether Komoot’s underlying network is healthy. I’d monitor closely its health by sport and geography: active contributors, contribution rate after a completed tour, freshness of local knowledge, time to first reuse, contributor retention, and the overlap between planners and contributors. Those are some of the indicators that would tell us whether the loop is compounding or quietly leaking away.
This is why Komoot deserves attention within the Bending Spoons portfolio. Its core value is not produced entirely inside the company. The asset includes years of accumulated community knowledge, but future value still depends on voluntary participation.
Bending Spoons’ centralised transformation playbook is well suited to rebuilding software. Interfaces can be redesigned. Infrastructure can be integrated. Costs can be reduced. Roadmaps can accelerate.
A community is different. You can’t buy the next contribution.
Bending Spoons has made Komoot better. The next test is whether it can make people want to build it again.
