Image courtesy of Beacon Capital Partners
An athletic training equipment brand backed by professional athletes including Jayson Tatum, Lyndsey Vonn and Patrick Mahomes has committed to a new location at Southline, the former Boston Globe headquarters in Dorchester.
Hyperice raised over $100 million in funding from Atlas Credit Partners in 2023. It has promoted its massage guns and other products through a series of endorsement deals with Olympians and professional athletes.
HyperIce signed a 6-year lease for 14,386 square feet at Southline, Beacon Capital Partners’ adaptive reuse of the 135 Morrissey Boulevard property.
Hyperice’s presence in Greater Boston includes its 2020 acquisition of Watertown-based Normatec, a competitor that manufactured leg recovery products used by professional athletes including Lakers star LeBron James.
Tatum, the Celtics forward currently recovering from a torn Achilles tendon suffered in last year’s playoffs, told Forbes in 2021 he was a daily user of Hyperice’s Hypervolt massage gun. Tatum is one of the company’s investors.
The company was founded in 2010, with backing from venture capital and investments by the NFL and NBA, and was valued as high as $700 million in 2020.
But Irvine, California-based Hyperice faces rising competition in its market niche, and claims competitors have been infringing on its products’ patents.
In 2024, the company sued competitor Therabody for patent infringement in federal court.
“There are hundreds of millions of dollars of massage guns sold every year in the U.S. alone, and we believe that a vast majority of these massage guns infringe this patent,” Hyperice CEO Jim Heuther said at the time.
Therabody responded with a lawsuit accusing Hyperice of defamation and trade libel.
Beacon Capital Partners originally envisioned its adaptive reuse of the former Globe headquarters to appeal to biotech companies. The Southline project attracted shared lab space providers Flagship Pioneering and Portal Innovations.
But its first tenant in 2022 turned out to be another athletic industry company: sportswear brand NOBULL leased 96,000 square feet in 2022.
Hyperice will occupy a ground-floor space at Southline, according to a filing at the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds. The lease runs for 72 months with a 5-year extension option.
Hyperice and Beacon Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment.
