Coming to the Dallas Cowboys’ HQ this June before stops in Miami, London and Paris, Xenom bills itself as the “decathlon of fitness,” offering an elite world stage for hardcore workout enthusiasts such as CrossFit athletes
Every day, people around the world work out with the intensity of professional athletes. Almost none of them have anywhere to compete like one. Now, a well-funded startup wants to give them a real scoreboard.
Xenom, which bills itself as the “Decathlon of Fitness,” has officially launched with a $15 million seed round.
WndrCo, the investment firm run by Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks, and Sujay Jaswa, a tech entrepreneur who served as CFO of Dropbox, led the round.
Xenom (officially stylized as XENOM) is announcing its debut competition, set for June 27-28 at Ford Center at The Star in Frisco, Texas, the corporate headquarters and practice facility of the Dallas Cowboys.
The format is fixed — 10 events over two days — and scored on a points-based index that gives athletes a consistent metric to train toward and measure themselves against. Xenom holds a CrossFit Event Partner Series license, meaning it can use CrossFit branding at its events.
credit: Xenom
Behind Xenom is founder and CEO Keith Barlow, a longtime CrossFit competitor and co-owner of fitness and wellness-focused PR agency Fittest.
“We see an incredible opportunity to build a global competition which re-energizes and meets the huge unmet demand from people training in boxes, garages and gyms around the world, for a complete standardized test including traditional endurance, gymnastics, weightlifting and combined metabolic conditioning,” Barlow said.
Xenom founder and CEO Keith Barlow (credit: Xenom)
Athletes can compete as individuals or in same-sex pairs across three divisions: Elite, RX and Compete, with 2,000 spots per event.
Three of the ten events have been revealed. One tests pure strength, where athletes get nine minutes to establish a one-rep max snatch, with four attempts at 90-second intervals. Another is a 3K run straight into a 2K Echo Ski with no time cap. The third is a gymnastics-heavy circuit of toes to bar, dumbbell hang snatches and bar muscle-ups, scaled in load and complexity across the three divisions. Seven more events will be announced in the coming weeks.
What Barlow is building, he says, goes well beyond a competition.
“What we’re offering people is the opportunity to be 100% human for a period of time,” he told Athletech News. “As we get more and more digital, the opportunities to connect in an analog, real-world space — that’s magic.”
And as global fitness and racing competitions see surging participation rates, Barlow said that Xenom is carving its own lane. What Hyrox did for running and training, Xenom, he said, will do for functional fitness and CrossFit athletes.
“Seed rounds generally aren’t this size in the fitness space,” Barlow added. “It speaks to the opportunity, and to the belief that this ecosystem is an exceptional space.”
The three divisions scale by experience level. Elite sets the highest technical bar, RX follows prescribed competition standards for seasoned CrossFit athletes and Compete offers scaled loading for those looking for an accessible entry point into the format.
The competition map is ambitious, with 11 events in Season 1 across the U.S. and Europe. Following the debut Texas event, Xenom is headed to London on Aug. 29-30 before stops in Miami and Paris, with dates to be determined.
credit: Xenom
To mark the launch, Xenom is releasing 250 free competition spots via a ballot open through March 13. After that, an individual entry runs $500.
Xenom has also tapped Rogue Fitness as its official equipment supplier. The company will unveil a new piece of competition-grade equipment before the season gets underway.
“They make the best equipment in the world,” Barlow said of Rogue Fitness owners Bill and Caity Henniger. “We basically have the king and queen of making equipment.”
Longer term, Barlow isn’t ruling out the biggest stage of all.
“You need to have a consistent format, global participation and the ability to attract a new audience,” he said of potentially breaking into the Olympics, the very ambition that Hyrox has set its own sights on. “I think we tick a lot of those boxes.”
