Questions,
answered.

Aster is a phone-first live tracking and sharing platform for endurance sport, races, club meet-ups, point-to-point adventures, and any ride or run you want watched. Athletes carry their phone, with no hardware to ship, watchers get a link to a live map, and organisers get a dashboard. iOS, Android, and web.

Five seats run on one platform, athletes (race and train), watchers (friends, family, fans), clubs, teams, and Event Organisers (race directors). Brand partners sit alongside them rather than on the same rungs. It is built for the races that could never carry a satellite tracker for every rider, which is almost all of them.

Dot watching is the community's term for following live GPS positions on a map during ultra-endurance bike races, bikepacking events like Tour Divide, Trans Am, the Atlas Mountain Race. It started as a subculture around Trackleaders' bikepacking coverage and has grown into the mainstream of endurance cycling spectatorship. Aster is built to bring that experience to every race rather than to the handful that could carry a tracker for every rider.

Strava is a training log with its own leaderboards. Strava Beacon, the live-share feature, is capped at 3 contacts and treated as a personal location share for family. Aster is a live tracking and sharing platform, unlimited watchers, live leaderboard, organiser dashboard, race-event infrastructure. Different product, different category.

Trackleaders typically runs on hardware satellite trackers (Spot Gen 4, Garmin inReach, Zoleo) shipped to each rider. Aster uses the rider's phone, with nothing to ship, recover, or replace.

RaceMap is a B2B SaaS with per-map-activation pricing plus per-tracker SIM fees, used mostly by larger European events. Aster is phone-first with a simple organiser subscription, plus an editorial layer (story feed, race recaps, athlete profiles) baked in.

Tracking and spectating are always free, whichever side of the tape you are on. Organisers pay a monthly subscription whose tier sets how many registrations each event can take, 100, 500 or 1,000, with the features identical on every tier. Try the whole flow first with a free club meet-up before you pick a size. No per-rider hardware cost, and no platform fee on your entries. See the pricing page for the current plans.

Set up in an afternoon. Create an organiser account and drop in a GPX, and Aster derives the route, the elevation profile and the finish line for you, then you set the start line and share the watch link. We are on the phone with organisers for the race-day of their first event as a baseline service.

Yes. Aster sits alongside RaceResult, MyLaps, ChronoTrack, or chip-on-the-line. We handle the live tracking and the watcher experience, your timing partner handles the official splits, and the two do not conflict.

Yes. The watch link is embeddable as a widget on your event site, so your domain stays the canonical destination and Aster powers the live tracking surface.

No. The watcher experience is web-first, your friends and family open a link in any browser, phone or desktop, and see your live position. No app install, no account creation, nothing in the way.

Unlimited. A personal location share works from a named contact list, and Strava Beacon caps that list at 3. Aster has no cap, so you can share the link with your whole family, your club channel, your sponsors, anyone.

Yes. Pings queue on-device for up to 7 days and upload automatically when signal returns. If you ride into a dead zone, the live line pauses on the map, and when you come out the other side it picks up where you left off, without losing the offline section.

Yes. Just Ride is for any ride or run that is not part of an event, solo training, group spins, recces, exploring. Same tracking, same watcher link, no event registration needed. Free for athletes, always.

Tap the big Alert button and a 60-second countdown starts, cancel any time before it sends, and even after, if it was a false alarm, so a pocket-tap or a recovered crash never raises a false one. When it sends, the organiser dashboard lights up with your position and two-way chat opens. Crash detection can start the same countdown automatically. The whole flow audit-trails to event records.

For modern phones, yes. iPhone 14+ and recent Android flagships use multi-band GNSS (L1 and L5) which matches Garmin and Wahoo bike computers for accuracy. The bottleneck for tracking in remote terrain is signal upload rather than GPS lock, and Aster's offline ping queue handles that.

Tracking stops when the battery does. Aster's battery modes, Live, Standard, Endurance, and Ultra, stretch one charge across the day and can be switched mid-activity. Long-distance bikepackers should still bring a power bank, the same as they would for any phone-dependent ride. If the battery dies and the rider charges later, the on-device buffer uploads on app reopen, so the polyline shows what they did even if the live feed went dark.

iOS and Android both require a visible notification when an app is using GPS in the background. The notification only confirms that tracking is active, and it carries no Stop button. Pocket-taps on the lock screen cannot end a ride.

A standalone ride or run not tied to any event. Start, go, stop. Generates a watch link you can share with anyone. Stats, polyline, photos all attach to a personal activity record. Crash detection runs in the background and can raise an Alert automatically.

James Vickers, 15 years in cycling industry marketing. Co-founder of RGT Cycling (acquired by Wahoo Fitness in 2022). Previously Wahoo and Classified Cycling, currently Marketing Consultant at Ribble Cycles. Aster is built solo with AI agent orchestration handling engineering, content, and operations.

United Kingdom (Manual Focus Ltd), operating globally across the UK, EU and US. Anyone can open a public event at astertrack.app and watch it live with no account.

No. The platform is proprietary. We publish technical writing and architecture decisions openly via our docs and blog, but the codebase itself is closed.

Yes, a £400 to 600k UK pre-seed, SEIS and EIS qualified. For investor enquiries, email james@astertrack.app.