Products that encourage people to love water sports even more

Real-time coaching

Dmitri Voloshin is the founder of SONR Inc, an entrepreneur from Eastern Europe, and more than a passionate athlete. Dmitri crossed the Bosphorus, became a national freediving champion, participated in the OceanMan swimming ultramarathon, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and in July 2014, won the title of IRONMAN in Zurich.

In 2012 Dmitri decided to become an IRONMAN. The preparations for this competition must be very serious. Dmitri was preparing for a swim part by working out with a coach in the pool. During the training, the coach used to shout at the top of his lungs: “Elbow! Watch your elbow! Elbow higher! Don’t reinforce your mistakes!” As Dmitri swam all he could hear were only fragments of sentences. The noise in the pool and the constant immersion of the head underwater made it difficult to hear the coach's voice. And an idea came to Dmitri’s mind: “It would be great if the coach would have a walkie-talkie, and I would have a device that would allow me to hear the coach's voice even underwater, adjust my technique right away.

Everything always starts with an idea, but we turned it into reality. This is how SONR swim coach communicator was created. It was created to overcome the main obstacle in swim coaching - the difficulty in real-time communication from the coach to the swimmer.

Until today, the coach was forced to shout, make signs, or wait for the swimmer to finish the lap and only then correct the mistakes. This leads to precious training time being wasted on waiting and repeated mistakes making the training process substantially less efficient. Now thanks to SONR, the coach can communicate with the swimmer in real time, loud and clear.

Dmitri Voloshin founded a start-up project named SONR which was developed by a team of engineers and Product Managers in the Republic of Moldova. The company SONR Inc was established in the United States after getting an investment from STARTA Accelerator for concept development.

SONR Team continues to develop new products. SONR Music Player and SONR Tracker are one of them.

SONR Music Player was created to give swimmers the possibility to listen to songs, audiobooks, and podcasts underwater. Thanks to this, athletes can forget about boring swimming laps, feel more motivated and energized, stay focused at every stroke with the rhythms of their favorite music, and enjoy swimming much more!

SONR Tracker measures swimmers’ metric data and provides it to them during and after training. Thanks to bone-conduction technology athletes can hear their metrics even when the head is underwater.  With its help swimmers also receive instant feedback and can correct their technique while swimming.

Our team believes that there is no such word as “impossible”. There is only the whole unexplored world full of brilliant ideas that one day can become real as SONR did.