Keith Barlow launched Xenom, the “Decathlon of Fitness”, in February 2026. Less than eight months later, it is licensed by CrossFit and Hyrox’s founders have invested in it.
One newcomer, coming from nowhere, with two of the biggest names in fitness wanting him to win. It may just be the fitness business strategy masterclass of 2026.
The first smart move was choosing the audience. CrossFit has had a tough time, but millions of people still train that way, spend serious money doing it and want somewhere to show what they can do. Barlow puts the number still practising the methodology at around four million. The CrossFit Games put the very elite on stage but most CrossFitters will never get there.
Xenom gives them their own moment: ten events over two days, a score on the board and something to show for all that sweat hamstring tears. That allowed Barlow to make it demanding and distinct from Hyrox, while building for an audience that already existed. Creating distance from the competition without isolating yourself is deceptively hard to do but it’s a challenge he has already overcome.
The timing helped too. CrossFit needed a good news story. The newcomer had something the giant needed.
Then he brought Hyrox to the table. Like it or not, Hyrox dominates the fitness conversation. On 7 October, its founders, Christian Toetzke and Moritz Fürste, announced they had invested in Xenom and joined its board, alongside a partnership covering marketing, events and education.
They can call the formats complementary. They still compete for people’s time, money and sporting identity. A huge part of Hyrox’s success is identity: people love how being a “hybrid rockstar” (their words, not mine) makes them feel. That attachment is powerful. It can also move if a new cook kid steals attention. A stake in Xenom lets Hyrox’s founders benefit if it does.
Barlow knows how this works because he helped build it. Through Fittest, the agency founded by his wife, Kate Burton-Barlow, he has worked with Toetzke and Fürste since 2020. Before that, he worked in finance at a family office.
When Unfiltered interviewed him in March 2026, he explained what investors needed convincing of. Hyrox had to create its demand from scratch. Xenom’s was already there.
He understood the audience, knew how to sell the opportunity and raised $15m to pursue it. None of that guarantees a great business: Xenom’s first event, in Dallas in June, drew 550 competitors. But getting a brand this new into a position where CrossFit supports it and Hyrox’s founders have money riding on it is something that any fitness founder should study.
How Xenom raised a $15m seed round
Was getting the investment harder or easier than you anticipated?
It’s never easy. Anyone that’s ever raised money knows that it’s not an easy process and you need to really be able to stand up your idea. The opportunity that we presented was really compelling and we were fortunate in that WndrCo [the investment firm founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa] really are very visionary as far as investors go. They really see the opportunity on a grand scale to build something like this and they got on board really quickly. So can’t speak highly enough of them. They’re very well known in the industry as kind of being for founders, like being for the people that they work with. And yeah, I can’t speak highly enough of them on that front.
What was it in investor conversations that people latched onto?
I think that clearly the fitness event space, the experience space, the experiential tourism area is something that is just so clearly growing and so clearly relevant in people’s lives that people really responded well to that.
I think that because fitness is so ubiquitous in people’s lives, like most people, it’s something they do if not every day, at least every week. It is a core part of human existence. And we talk a lot about kind of shared passion. It’s like if you can build IP, if you can build product around a shared passion, it almost doesn’t matter what it is. Like that could be Marvel. Like you could love Marvel and you have millions of people who love Marvel, you can have millions of people who love football, if you have millions of people who love doing burpees and lifting heavy weights and doing muscle-ups, like that’s an incredible opportunity to have cultural positioning with a consumer base that you can go and create products for, that you can go and create experiences for, that you can go and create stuff that really matters to you. That passion already exists, just no one’s making anything specifically for them at the moment.
When you were pitching to investors, was there anything they were sceptical about?
Sujay [Jaswa] is a CrossFitter. So he knew the space, he knew it in and out, and he understood the opportunity straight away. I think if you’re explaining this to a financial analyst who maybe hasn’t been a core part of the space, [it’s a] little bit more difficult to kind of go through a financial model and really read everything through and explain why it works.
But at the same time, look, when Hyrox launched, no one in the world, I can’t tell you the number of times I had conversations with people about Hyrox when we [Fittest, Hyrox’s PR agency] first launched, and it was like, “No one is ever, ever going to be interested in running eight kilometres and doing eight functional movements. Like, what are you doing? Like, you guys are idiots. Like, that’s never going to work.” So we had to go and create that demand. Like, we had to go and create a completely new type of athlete, and we had to create a demand for 1.8 million people this year to go and do it.
That demand already exists for us. The CrossFitters are already out there. The people that are doing this stuff are already out there. So we don’t have to do that first really hard part. We just have to convince them to come and do the event.
Was there anything you changed from the first pitch to the last?
The name. The name, we went through a few different iterations of the name.
It’s interesting when you’re coming up with something like this, the name you want to be distinctive but you want it to be something that you can really own, you want it to not have connotation to anything that already exists. There’s always a temptation to go down a name that has a very specific meaning to it or that has a very specific kind of emotive response. We very much wanted something that we could imprint onto ourselves.
And that’s something that I think if you look at a lot of great brands, they have done and do very well. So yeah, we changed that a few times.
What would your advice be to somebody else trying to raise money?
I think if you’re raising, it depends who you’re trying to raise money from and I’m assuming then that we’re talking about people that are looking for VC money on something new. I think that you have to have a really good understanding of what the opportunity is for the investor in terms of how big’s the market, how unique is the idea, how protectable is it, and don’t go in thinking about an exit. I think no one in VC is sold on “we can get this exit from this person in five years’ time”.
I think that you have to go in and say, “I’m super passionate about building this business,” because so much of what they’re doing is they’re making a bet on you and then they’re making a bet on the size of the market and the chance of success. So yeah, those would be the three things that I’d be thinking about.
What can you do that you can protect?
Get a good trademark lawyer and do it quick. So we’ve trademarked Xenom. We’ve trademarked the decathlon of fitness across the globe. And I think that you’ve got to be really sharp with that stuff now. You don’t want to get caught up in that five years down the line and find that someone scooped you on a market you didn’t know that you needed.
What Xenom’s investors expect from Keith Barlow
Now you have the money, you’ve got to deliver. What would success look like to your investors?
I mean genuinely our investors are pretty, I’d say relaxed. They’re obviously not relaxed, they’re venture capital investors. But we talked about the fact that there are only so many great brands that you can build. There are only a few generational brands that get built every few years and we think this is the opportunity to build one of them in fitness. And so I think that’s the marker of success […] is Xenom a household name? Is it the de facto measure of human fitness down the line?
In the same way that, think about like, if you thought in the 90s, what would be your definition of like a high-performing person? Ironman almost inevitably would have come into it, like, “Yeah, he’s a guy who does that,” kind of a feeling. I think if we had that, we’d be on our way to where we wanted to be.
Are you under pressure now to deliver?
Yes, of course. Yeah, massive pressure, but I think don’t go and raise money if you’re not up for the fight. Yeah, massive pressure to deliver. We’ve got a lot to do, but huge opportunity to go and do it and pull it off, and something that I genuinely wake up every day and I’m just super excited to get to work on this stuff now.
Is that part of your character?
Yeah, 100%. I think in every job I’ve ever done, I have always sought to take responsibility before being asked to take it. I’ve always preferred to be in control myself and take the blame if something goes wrong, but be operating within my own authority.
We’ve run our own business for the last five years. Prior to that I worked for a private equity fund or a family office in London and I came into that from a fairly conventional background. I didn’t have like a strict finance background, I hadn’t studied kind of the things that you would expect to take you into there, but in that company I very quickly, across the course of five years, took responsibility ahead of my time. And so yeah, that’s always been something that I’ve done.
Xenom’s business model: tickets, sponsorship and Rogue
Of all the moving parts, what’s been the most challenging?
I think it’s a really good question. It’s all been relatively challenging. Obviously we did quite a large fundraise. For a business in fitness, quite a large seed fundraise for a business that isn’t software, that was relatively complicated. We were really fortunate that WndrCo coming on board really understood our vision of how big this sport can be and how big the opportunity is for consumers in this space.
We did a foundational partnership with Rogue. Rogue is the best business in fitness. It’s an education working with Bill and Caity Henniger, who run Rogue and have built an unreal operation. That was relatively complicated.
And now we’re selling, and look, we’re selling a $500 ticket to an athlete with a product that’s never existed before. And so now we’re into bringing this product to market. It’s been really encouraging. Sales have been really strong. We know people are interested in it. We have to do another 10 of these events this year. The ideas bit is done and now we’re into the grind of really executing on the business.
As the brand and the product develop, where will the cash come from?
So we have quite an easy business model to understand. So we sell athlete tickets, we sell spectator tickets, we do sponsorships, we do a photography package and we do merchandise. Those are our core revenue drivers.
There are other bits and pieces, like you maybe work with the Sports Commission or you work with local governments that are interested in bringing an event to the local area, but our core business is tickets, sponsorships, merchandise.
What’s the right balance of focus versus brand extension?
I think that I’m not an expert in creating a supplement company, I’m not an expert in creating apparel from scratch. I would far rather find really great commercial partners to work with. I think in general, businesses that grow the pie for everyone and then let other people have bits of that pie are far more attractive than just trying to control it all yourself.
Yeah, and it becomes a bit of a distraction. Like if you’re trying to run 60 events in a global season, you’ve got your time pretty heavily occupied on creating that operational excellence and creating that demand there. So yeah, not on the cards, certainly at the moment.
Xenom, Hyrox and CrossFit
Is there any element of what you’re doing that will make everybody else in the category nervous?
Er, I hope so. Yeah, of course. We wouldn’t be running this business if we didn’t think it was a really good idea, and we wouldn’t have had the investment from people like WndrCo and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa who didn’t think, “OK, we can really invest into this and this is the opportunity to grow massively.” Yeah, so I hope so.
I think that we have a format and we have a delivery mechanism that certainly hasn’t existed before and does something unique in terms of creating this global standardised quantifiable measure of human fitness.
What is your favourite thing about Hyrox?
I think that they changed the landscape. I think that CrossFit changed the landscape two decades ago and made gyms, completely changed how gyms looked. It took it from weight-based, Nautilus machines to functional training areas, barbells, rubber matting, dumbbells, pull-up bars.
I think Hyrox then made another evolution of it, which was the scale of the event. They took events and they said, “Hey, here’s fitness, but Tomorrowland.” They took it and they showed people what events can mean to people. And I think that we will have a similar impact on the space.
CrossFit, it could be said, has had struggles in recent years. Could this revive them as a brand?
Look, I’m obviously not here to comment on another brand and how they operate and what they do. That said, CrossFit changed my life. I met my wife in a CrossFit gym. I believe that the methodology and I believe that the fundamentals of what they do is an incredibly, incredibly uniquely powerful force in the world.
