About
Any ride or run,
live on the map.
Aster makes any ride or run watchable live. It is built in the UK by Manual Focus Ltd, it runs on the phones athletes already carry, and it is built solo by James Vickers with AI agent orchestration handling the stack.
Why Aster exists
Tracking has followed the hardware since 2009.
The first tracked bikepacking ultras went out in 2009 on satellite pucks, one device per rider, shipped out, strapped on, recovered and replaced. A handful of marquee races carried that cost and got a live audience out of it. Almost everything else, the regional gravel race, the club championship, the Tuesday-night chaingang, got a results sheet the next morning.
The audience was never the missing piece, because the people who want to watch a regional race are the same people who watch Tour Divide, and they are usually the ones who drove someone to the start. What was missing was a way to put the whole field live without a device per athlete.
Aster is that way. The whole field goes live from the phones the athletes already carry, with nothing to ship, recover or replace, and one link puts anyone watching in the middle of it.
How Aster is built
One operator. AI handling the stack.
Aster is a working proof of the brand-to-platform thesis, an endurance-sport brand operating as a software platform, run by a single operator with AI handling the rest. Orchestrated AI agents run business analysis, product, engineering requirements, market research, development, testing, marketing and content. The human is in the loop for an otherwise self-running operation.
The tech stack is native iOS and Android apps via Capacitor, a React PWA, a Node and Fastify API, Postgres with PostGIS for geographic queries, Mapbox for live maps, Redis for live leaderboard state, and Socket.IO for the watcher experience. Product design answers to six reliability rules that no feature may break, and the first two are that starting and finishing an activity always work with no signal, and that the app never signs an athlete out on its own.
Fundraising
Pre-seed. UK. SEIS + EIS qualified.
Aster is raising a £400 to 600k pre-seed, designed to clear via SEIS for the first £250k and EIS for the balance.
For investor enquiries, email james@astertrack.app.
Aster makes the whole event watchable live, with no hardware.
Your whole field goes live from the phones the athletes already carry. No trackers to ship, nothing to hire, the entire event watchable, not one lone athlete.