A half marathon race held in Kaihua County's Qianjiangyuan National Park, in East China's Zhejiang province, attracted many runners from home and abroad. Online registrations for the race quickly accounted for more than half of the participant limit during just the first few days after the official website was opened.

The IT system , which allowed the site to run without a hitch, is the running race SaaS platform independently developed by Runnar.

The running event platform company Runnar, based on cloud computing and big data, was founded in May 2015. The business model of Runnar covers 4 aspects: events as access, platform value creation, full-cycle profiting, and data as assets.

Since establishment, the company has been focused on serving races with technology. Runnar is providing Chinese runners with global event support on the consumer clients side, as well as race registration, payment management, race timing, score management, race planning and organization, IP events for the race organizers on the business clients side. It has now become a highly influential running race platform company in China.

The chief executive of Runnar says the running race platform that Runnar is planning and building has many characteristics, including focusing on the eco-system of running events, covering race registration, organization and self-created IP events.

Since 2015, Runnar has developed a strategic partnership with the world-renowned running race platform company Athlinks. The two have cooperated to launch international races in China by providing technical support in registration, payment, and security maintenance.

In order to better serve Chinese runners, Runnar and Athlinks set up two project teams in Beijing and Denver respectively, with Runnar CEO Chun Chang and Athlinks founder Troy Busot as project managers, to start the process of developing and testing the system. Runnar and Athlinks conduct daily conference calls about problems faced during technology development such as “how to modify credit card payment, which western runners are familiar with, into more Chinese-user-friendly WeChat and Alipay payment” etc.

In addition to supporting international races being launched in China, Runnar also offers the SaaS platform race service based on cloud computing and big data to the world’s 9th largest marathon, the Hawaii Honolulu Marathon, and the most historic Asian marathon, the Seoul Marathon. Runnar is so far the only Chinese company that can offer SaaS service to renowned international running races.

Athlinks, with its headquarters in Denver, USA, is the largest-scale running race SaaS platform company. Established in 2006, it has since accumulated more than 500 thousand races and 210 million units of data. In February 2013 Athlinks merged with Chronotrack, which focuses mainly on serving B-side clients by providing solutions to race organizers such as timing and registration systems.

After the merger of the two companies, they fully integrated and extended their SaaS technical services to both C-side participants and B-side organizers as a practical race service platform meeting the fragmented needs of medium to mini-scale races.