There’s a difference between selling hype and building heat. And Ten Thousand isn’t here for the noise, they’re stitching substance into every seam.
While the rest of the men’s activewear game is chasing clout and cranking out influencer-core drop after drop, Keith B. Nowak and Eugenio Labadie built a performance brand for the ones who actually train, not the ones just posting about it. No gimmicks. No flex. Just a clean, hyper-engineered line of training gear forged for the serious athlete, military professional, and every hybrid beast grinding in the 5 a.m. shadows before the world wakes up.
This week, Forza Capital doubled down with a fresh Series B investment in Ten Thousand, adding fuel to a brand that’s already profitable, growing, and running laps around the competition. And no, the check size isn’t public. But let’s just say when Sabin Burrell and John Hynes place a bet, they don’t do it for the press clippings. Forza Capital doesn’t dabble, they accelerate brands with real backbone.
Ten Thousand’s journey isn’t your standard founder fairy tale. Keith B. Nowak, a former Serie C pro footballer turned VC, had already been behind early bets on Everlane, Warby Parker, and ClassPass before he built this one from scratch. Eugenio Labadie, who now heads up Carondelet Partners, stepped off the Sullivan & Cromwell train and into the startup trenches years ago. Together, they saw the gap: men had performance standards in the gym but not in their gear. So they built their own uniform, testing fabrics like lab rats with a six-pack, pushing abrasion cycles past 10,000 reps (yeah, the name’s not just branding), and dialing shrinkage control like it’s a NASA launch checklist.
And the growth? Quietly elite. Profitable since April 2020. Over 50,000 five-star reviews. Gear that’s earned its way into every state. A three-year exclusive deal with Life Time Athletic Country Clubs. A collab with GORUCK that spiked AOV by 46%. And if you train at Equinox, you’ve probably already worn their shorts, you just didn’t know who made them.
Series A in 2023 was $21.5M with Provenance, Fernbrook, and Alfa leading the charge, plus early support from names like Dave Gilboa, Blue Scorpion, and Elizabeth Street Ventures. But this latest capital infusion? It’s not just more cash, it’s a signal. A marker. A brand built on durability just got more firepower to scale smart, expand channels, and keep building for the ones who don’t need the spotlight, they just want to train in something that can actually keep up.
Anton Romash is on the board repping Provenance. He saw this early. And with Shopify Plus, custom B2B tooling, and data-driven DTC discipline, Ten Thousand’s tech stack runs as clean as their compression gear.
This isn’t about chasing trends. It’s about building performance gear with staying power. The kind that lasts ten thousand workouts, and ten thousand more.
