A new company at Eurobike, S Rower, is aiming to turn your existing smart trainer into a smart rower, with its bolt-on attachment that works with pretty much any direct drive smart trainer. The company unveiled itself (and its product) here at Eurobike 2025, with a hardware accessory that takes advantage of the relatively universal standards of smart trainers, including both hardware attachment points as well as software control.
I had a chance to briefly look at the two pre-production units they had brought to Eurobike, which were mounted to both an Elite Suito smart trainer, as well as a Tacx NEO 2 smart trainer. What’s notable is that neither of those smart trainers are new or high-end by today’s standards, with the Suito being 7-8 years old, and the Tacx NEO 2 being about the same.
Ok, so starting off with the hardware first. The unit is an aluminum beam, currently as one giant piece. It sounds like for production they’ll likely aim to break it apart into two pieces with some sort of attachment coupling mechanism in the middle, mainly to simplify shipping, but storage as well. In any event, today you’ve got the main beam, and then it attaches to the head-unit component at the top.
Of course you’ve got your seat that rolls along the beam, along with a spot for pedals to be installed.
So, moving upwards towards the smart trainer, we’ve got the S Rower ‘head unit’, or main module. This attaches to your smart trainer via its cassette. It uses a standard bicycle thru-axle to attach to the trainer just like your bike would, except that instead of a chain, it locks onto the cassette’s outer most gear:
Then, inside the S Rower module (the case looking part), there’s a belt drive that connects to a wheel, which in turn connects to the rower handle. Note that it is indeed a belt drive, not a chain drive. Thus, it’s totally silent.
Atop that you see a small display, that’s just a simple tablet placed up there in a groove. You can attach any tablet you want, though I suspect the exact specifics of that little grove will change slightly by the time it ships.
Meanwhile, the tablet is running whatever smart trainer software you want. That’s because the S Rower doesn’t actually care what software you have, since that’s between your app and the smart trainer. Sure, they have a demo application here, in which case it’s using Bluetooth FTMS to control the trainer’s resistance level, but it could be any application.
For example, in chatting with the icTrainer app folks shortly after this, a few booths over, they already support structured workouts for rowing, and they already support every smart trainer on the market (and it costs a mere $29/year). Seems like a pretty obvious future pairing.
But again, that’s the cool part of standards – it doesn’t matter. The S Rower is leveraging cycling axle & cassette standards that work on every direct drive smart trainer ever made. And in turn, whatever app the user ultimately uses for the rowing portion is also leveraging with ANT+ FE-C or Bluetooth FTMS standards that have also been on every smart trainer made in the last 12-15 years. Again, standards are fun.
In any case, on to the most important: pricing and availability. Right now the company is aiming to start delivering products in Q2 2026 (so next spring), and the units will be produced in Italy. The units will be priced at $695USD, though you can pre-order today and there’s a discount down to $520USD.
To me, that seems ($520) incredibly reasonable compared to full blown rowers (normally $1,000 for non-smart integrated ones, such as the Concept 2). If you added the cost of a budget smart trainer ($400), or a secondhand one ($200-$300), you’re still talking substantially less than most smart rower setups (many of which don’t fold away very easily). Assuming the company can manage to deliver on the availability, and most critically, what rowers think of the rowing feel/inertia, I suspect they could be a runaway success.
But as always, time will tell. I suppose we’ll have to see next Eurobike, in late June 2026, whether or not they’ve hit their goals.
With that – thanks for reading!
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Count me as interested
This looks like a brilliant idea! Hope they can deliver.
Also, I like that the guy on the video is rowing with road bike shoes :D
Fantastic idea, but rather expensive for what your getting
I would argue that depends on how you look at it. When I read it – I see I do not need to store a full size rower as a concept 2 but I get the functionality of a rowing machine at a substantially lower price. So for me it looks like the value I could vs price is a bargin. If you are a cost + pricing guy, I can understand you might think it is expensive.
I don’t understand why bike pedals? Clearly you can’t do fast bike row transitions (not that I can ever think I’d want to), but when rowing I want a solid flat platform to push against with toe straps. Seems that they made this more complicated than it needed to be.
Otherwise I can imagine this being really really good for a very small number of people. It’s the Venn diagram intercept of people in the upper 5% of cyclists that have a smart trainer AND gym rats And non-competitive rowers (who would want/need the concept 2). Don’t get me wrong, I’d class myself in that, and I have a ‘spare’ smart trainer so if it had been available where I am then I’d drop the $520 today, but it’s going to need a lot of ‘free’ publicity to reach the potential buyers as the return on traditional advertising for awareness is going to be too low given the breadth they would need to go.
I’m not sure I entirely understand the bike pedal choice either, but I’ll swing back by tomorrow and ask why specifically.
As for the overlap, I think it’s greater than one might think. I was surprised at the number of people on the floor that were super excited about this, that had mentioned seeing it to me. Obviously, everyone on the floor is a cyclist (and an industry cyclist at this point, since open day isn’t till Sat/Sun).
I think bike pedals are not the worst idea: you clip in with your cycling shoes wich are stiff enough to push against, they are made for that. When clipped in, you can also pull yourself forward so you don’t rely on the strap. Also, bike shoes are most likely available when there is a smart trainer.
The price point is hard. For 1200€ I get a brand new C2 rowerg with an PM5. C2 sells competition rowers even cheaper after the competition. Those rowers can be split in two pieces in seconds and are state of the art in my opinion.
Ray, if you could try to connect any Garmin watch with the indoor rowing app, that would be fine. I only know of the C2 PM5 computer wich they connect to. If this is working, than I would really be interested in it.