Leo Koenig

Founder & CEO WOO Sports

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Leo Koenig is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of WOO Sports, a company he started with two fellow European kiteboarders that makes a small onboard motion sensor for action sports. The original device does one thing precisely: it mounts to a kiteboard and measures how high the rider jumps. That narrow function turned out to have an outsized effect, because it made an inherently subjective sport measurable, and therefore comparable. Riders could see their own numbers, compare them against friends, and place themselves on a global leaderboard — a shift that trade coverage credits with gamifying kiteboarding, and that grew a community of around 45,000 members. Koenig is a mechanical engineer by training, with master’s degrees from TU Darmstadt and Lund University.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded WOO Sports with two fellow European kiteboarders and leads it as CEO.
• Created an onboard motion sensor and app that measures and scores jump height, credited with the gamification of kiteboarding.
• Raised $10.6 million across seven funding rounds since 2013.
• Built a community of roughly 45,000 members around shared performance data.
• Extended the platform from kiteboarding into surfing, skiing, snowboarding, and other adventure sports.
• Holds master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Lund University and in mechanical and process engineering from TU Darmstadt.

Professional Journey

Koenig trained as a mechanical engineer, taking a master’s in mechanical and process engineering at Technische Universität Darmstadt and a Master of Science in mechanical engineering at Lund University’s Faculty of Engineering, where his thesis examined enterprise architecture within Scania’s research and development organization. He worked as a Product Application Engineer at PTC, the product lifecycle management software company, after an earlier engineering internship at Artisent.

WOO began from the sport rather than the technology. Koenig and two other European kiteboarders wanted to know how high they were actually jumping — a question riders had always argued about and never been able to settle, since jump height is hard to judge from the water and impossible to compare across sessions or locations. Answering it properly is a non-trivial engineering problem: the device has to survive saltwater impact, run on a small battery, and extract a reliable height figure from raw accelerometer and gyroscope data while attached to a board that is itself pitching and rotating.

The resulting product was a small sensor that mounts to the board and pairs with a phone app. What made it significant was not the measurement but what the measurement enabled. Once height was an objective number, it could be recorded, compared, and ranked, and kiteboarding acquired something it had never had: a scoreboard. Riders competed against their own records and against a global leaderboard, sessions became shareable, and a community formed around the data — roughly 45,000 members. Trade press came to describe Koenig as the person responsible for the gamification of the sport.

The company raised $10.6 million across seven funding rounds from its first raise in 2013, and extended the same approach to surfing, skiing, snowboarding, and other adventure sports, where the underlying problem is identical: performance that participants care about intensely but have never been able to measure. Koenig has continued to lead the company from Austria, with his engineering background visible in a product whose value depends entirely on the accuracy of what it reports.

Education

Lund University, Faculty of Engineering

Master of Science, Mechanical Engineering

Technische Universität Darmstadt

Master’s degree, Mechanical and Process Engineering