About
Built by cyclists,
for cyclists.
Aster is a phone-first live tracking and sharing platform for endurance cycling. Built solo with AI agent orchestration, launching properly in spring 2027.
Why Aster exists
Live tracking has looked the same for 17 years.
5% of bike races get live tracking — the marquee ultras (Tour Divide, Trans Am, Atlas Mountain). The other 95% — the regional gravel race, the club championship, the Tuesday-night chaingang — get nothing live. The audience is the same audience either way: people who want to watch a bike race unfold in real time.
The reason for the gap isn’t audience. It’s economics. Hardware satellite trackers cost £20–50k per event to ship, recover, and replace. That maths works for the marquee 5% and breaks for everyone else.
Aster is the modern layer underneath. Phone-first tracking, no hardware to ship, a sharing experience built for the audience already on their phone. Built for the 95% of races that have never had tracking — and the 5% who want a better one.
The founder
James Vickers — 15 years in cycling.
Aster is built solo by James Vickers, with AI agent orchestration handling engineering, content, and operations. James previously co-founded RGT Cycling (acquired by Wahoo Fitness in 2022), where he led the brand from 100 users to 450,000, lifted prompted brand recall from 2 to 95, and played a critical role in the corporate strategy and diligence of the Wahoo acquisition.
Since RGT he’s held senior marketing roles at Wahoo Fitness (Head of Marketing, Subscription Services), Classified Cycling (Head of Marketing and Communications), and currently consults as Marketing Director at Ribble Cycles (£1.2M budget; secured BBC + ITV TV coverage in 2025; Presenting Partner of the British Gravel Championships).
He’s a member of CIM and the Chartered Institute of PR, raced in the 2025 UK National Championships (15th), and lives between Sheffield and Lincoln. Aster is the working answer to “how much business can one operator run when AI handles the stack?”
15 yrs
in cycling industry
450k
RGT users grown to
£1.2M
Ribble budget managed
15th
UK National Champs 2025
More on the story: about the founder press & media kit
How Aster is built
One operator. AI handling the stack.
Aster is a working proof of the brand-to-platform thesis: a cycling 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.
Tech stack: native iOS and Android apps via Capacitor, React PWA, Node/Fastify API, Postgres with PostGIS for geographic queries, Mapbox for live maps, Redis for real-time leaderboard state, Socket.IO for the watcher experience. Four non-negotiable rider-safety rules drive product design: offline start/finish, never auto-logout, tracking persists, never lose a ping.
Fundraising
Pre-seed. UK. SEIS + EIS qualified.
Aster is raising a £400–600k pre-seed, designed to clear via SEIS for the first £250k and EIS for the balance. UK investors get up to 50% income tax relief on day one, with loss relief capping the downside even in a full write-off.
For investor enquiries, email james@astertrack.app.
Want to put your race on Aster?
We’ll walk through your race, the dashboard, and what a launch on Aster would look like.