Riding should be fun.
Voice comms with your group while you ride, races against your friends' ghosts and your own past self, and workouts the road writes for you — on the phone already in your pocket.
Mid-ride. Not a mock-up.
Already in your hands
Four things that make a ride worth recording.
On the bars
An in-ride screen worth glancing at
One number the size of your palm, with the zone band underneath it. You look down, you know, you look back up.
The climb ahead is drawn before you reach it, with metres left to the top. And the arrival time knows the terrain in front of you, not just your average so far, so it holds when the road tilts up.
You have watched someone stop mid-ride to fight a menu on a screen from 2009 — a device that costs as much as the phone already in their pocket, with a worse UI. The phone is bigger, brighter, and knows more: it can speak, it can warn you, and it never asks you to sync anything. Sykla just uses it properly.
It is the screen in the phone at the top of this page. Mid-ride, not a mock-up.
One number, the zone band, the climb, and an arrival time that holds.
Together
Talk while you ride
Start a group, share the code, and everyone's start is synchronised. No counting down over text.
Voice stays open with the screen off and the phone in your pocket. It ducks for a turn call, and it hands your music back afterwards.
Riding together is free.
Voice open, screens off. A turn call ducks it; your music comes back.
Compete
Race the board, or your past self
Segments are yours to carve out of your own rides. Make one and it is backfilled with everyone who already rode through, so no board is empty on the day you make it.
Star a segment, say go for it, and the screen holds plus or minus seconds against your best the whole way through.
Weekly races run on real ground, ridden wherever you are.
A new segment, and a board that already has riders on it.
The part nobody else does
Old you isn't always better than you
Best times at real distances: 5K, 10K, a century. Sykla keeps them for this month, beside all time.
Two years in, an all-time best can drift out of reach and quietly stop rewarding you. The monthly one never does. The board resets, the target comes back within range, and there is confetti to earn every month.
All time beside this month, and only one of them still hands out confetti.
Multisport
Triathlons, start to finish line.
The whole event is one workout: swim, T1, bike, T2, run — legs and timed transitions, one result at the end. Start it from the watch and the clocks take care of themselves.
On the bike leg the phone takes over as the ride computer — the map, the navigation, the climb ahead — while the watch keeps the event clock. A transition begins from whichever device you tap first.
Swims are measured honestly: counted lengths in the pool, GPS in open water. A brick day counts once in your week, not twice.
Legs and transitions on one clock, wrist and phone sharing the work.
The world
Trainer riders and road riders, one world.
The Sykla desktop sim connects to your smart trainer over Bluetooth — ERG workouts, structured intervals, real resistance on real route gradients. And its world is shared: ride with friends live, schedule group rides, or race the ghost of any past effort.
Road riders, trainer riders, and past efforts share the same road.
The indoor world
Every road you ride becomes a world.
Finish a ride outside and that road exists indoors: real distance, real climbing, ridden again from your trainer. The riders who shared the same road appear on it as ghosts, replayed at the pace they actually rode. Your world grows every time you go outside.
Beyond your own roads, the famous ground: thirty regions of real road network with real elevation. Alpe d'Huez, the Stelvio, Ventoux, the Angliru. The Smokies and the Blue Ridge Parkway, section by section.
And five real racetracks: Spa-Francorchamps, Le Mans (the full Circuit de la Sarthe and the Bugatti), Mugello, VIR, and Sonoma, with live lap and sector timing against your own best. Drafting is a slipstream model, not a power-up, and a pace Rabbit gives you a wheel when you ride alone. The climb through Eau Rouge is the actual gradient.
Real elevation, sector by sector, against your own best lap.
In your ear
In-ear training, tuned to you.
"Climb on Old Apex Road. 2.1 kilometers at 6 percent." A voice that knows the road ahead and your history on it, coaching your ride as it happens — and speaking only when it has something to say.
On long routes it calls the chapters. It names the roads. Ask the road to write your workout and it calls the threshold efforts. Race a past version of yourself and it reads you the live gap.
One mute switch turns all of it off. Safety warnings speak anyway.
One voice, one mute switch. Safety warnings always speak.
Safety first
Safety alerts, built from real crash records.
State crash records, NCDOT today, mapped onto the roads you actually ride. When you approach a site with a history of fatal accidents, or a corridor where crashes cluster, Sykla says so out loud, about twenty seconds before you reach it.
Spoken, haptic, and on screen, with the phone still in your pocket.
Like everything in the safety layer, it is never gated and never paywalled. Free plan, paid plan, lapsed plan: the warning speaks.
A high-crash corridor ahead, and the warning that precedes it.
Beacons
One tap tells the people you chose where you are. Riders nearby can be told too, and the ones who come get to be thanked.
Crash detection
A hard impact, and then a rider who does not move, starts a countdown you can hold a button to stop. If you do not, your safety contacts get your location. Emergency services are never called.
Hazards, from riders ahead
Glass, gravel, a blind turn, a bad gate. Flagged by whoever met it first, and announced to you in time to matter rather than as you hit it.
Live location, on your terms
Share a link for one ride. It ends when the ride does, and it tells the watcher honestly when it has gone stale instead of showing a stale dot.
Never ride alone
Twenty seconds into a ride, Sykla tells you who is riding within five kilometers. Wave, pull them into voice comms, or ride together. Companions who name each other as safety contacts get a direct line.
Take me back
Lost, cooked, or out of daylight: one tap routes you from here back to where you started, on the calmer streets, with turns in your ear. Mid-ride, no planning required.
The safety layer is free, forever, on every plan.
Safety is never behind a paywallWhy Sykla exists
A car hit me on a ride.
I healed. The anxiety didn't. That sentence is why Sykla exists.
On the road
A recorder that respects your effort.
Honest distance
A Kalman-filtered GPS pipeline with stop detection, so a 5k is a 5k — not 5.4. No inflated averages from standing at a stoplight.
Heart-rate zones
Pair any Bluetooth strap. Zones 1–5 color the screen as you work, from glacier blue to heart red, and every effort keeps its time-in-zone.
One effort, three phases
Warmup, workout, cooldown — in a single recording. Your headline pace comes from the workout, so the cooldown jog never poisons your numbers.
Segments & “Go for it”
Carve a section of any route, star it, and race it live — the screen shows +/− seconds against your best, in real time.
Milestones & badges
Confetti at your 5k. A crown at 8,849 m of climbing. Streaks that build. Earned, never given.
Your data, your rules
Efforts live on your device. Share what you want, trim the start and end of public routes so nobody learns where you live, and everything still counts.
This is the short version. Every feature and every spec, organized →
Racing, everywhere you ride.
Weekly races on real roads, ridden wherever you are. Virtual races on Alpe d'Huez or seven laps of Spa. Ghost challenges thrown at a friend by text. And events built from legs — climb the mountain on the trainer Tuesday, ride the road leg Saturday, one result at the end.
One rule keeps every result worth having: outdoor legs race outdoors, virtual legs race virtually, and a mixed event chains them — it never scores an hour on the road against an hour on rollers. Your win means what it says.
Ghost challenges and racing yourself are in the beta today; multi-leg events are the roadmap.
Pricing
Recording is free. Forever.
Free
The full recorder: honest distance, heart-rate zones, badges, sync, suggested routes, and Strava.
Real World
The whole outdoor platform: KOM racing, weekly races, turn-by-turn navigation, radar, advanced analytics, multisport, group voice. No coaching.
Complete
All of Real World, plus coaching and structured training — sessions counted into your ear while you ride.
Both Worlds
All of Complete, plus the 3D world: smart-trainer rides on real roads at real grades, ghosts, and one shared road for indoor and outdoor riders. The virtual world is in beta today. Subscribe annually now and you get a free year of it when it opens.
Get riding
Three ways in.
Ride it today
The iOS app is on the App Store. Free. No account required to record.
Create your account
One account across phone, desktop, and web. It carries your plan, your referral code, and your place on the leaderboards.
The desktop world
The macOS app that turns your trainer into real roads is built and is coming as a download. iOS riders hear first.
Where we are
Sykla 1.0 is on the App Store. The desktop world is coming as a download. Accounts, sync, segments, weekly races, and the safety layer are live; billing is not switched on yet, so paid features are open to early riders. *GPS accuracy figure is from our synthetic ground-truth test suite; real-world calibration is ongoing.