Months after Meta ended new development and laid off its team, Supernatural is being rebuilt as an independent company. Head of Fitness Leanne Pedante tells UploadVR about the unlikely path back.
When Meta ended new development of Supernatural and laid off its team in January, it appeared to be the end of one of VR’s most recognizable fitness services.
Instead, something unusual happened.
Five months later, Meta announced that Supernatural Health, a newly formed independent company, would take over the Supernatural experience, giving the service a path to continue outside of Meta. A new app is expected to launch on the Meta Horizon Store this fall, while Meta’s existing Supernatural app will remain available until December 3.
The original founders are returning. Former members of the team are coming back. And a service Meta had decided to stop developing is now being rebuilt outside the company.
Meta’s June announcement explained what would happen, but offered little detail about how Supernatural arrived at this unexpected second life.
Leanne Pedante can’t answer what happened inside Meta to make that possible. But as Supernatural’s Head of Fitness and a longtime coach, she can tell the story from the other side. She was among those who lost their jobs in January and, months later, found herself helping rebuild Supernatural as part of a much smaller independent team.
And for Pedante, that story begins thousands of miles away from Meta.
An Unexpected Call In Italy
After the layoffs, Pedante started dismantling her life in Los Angeles.
She gave up her apartment, put her belongings into storage and left for Europe without knowing exactly when she would return. The trip had already been in the works, but suddenly there was no job waiting for her back home.
“I was like, maybe I won’t come back,” Pedante told UploadVR.
Then, about two weeks after arriving in Italy, she began hearing from Supernatural’s original founders.
The possibility they were discussing seemed improbable: What if Supernatural could continue?
The timing struck Pedante as almost absurd. After years of having a home and career to return to, she had finally given both up.
“I felt like it was like the cosmic joke,” she recalled.
Pedante wasn’t ready to believe it yet.
“It sounded like such a long shot that I really wasn’t getting my hopes up too much,” she said.
So she stayed in Italy while conversations continued back home.
Roughly two months later, Pedante returned to find that the long shot had become something much more concrete.
“Everyone is aligned and this is actually going to happen,” she recalled realizing.
“So then I had a job again.”
“This Is Not Like Any Other Layoff”
The path toward that return began with a shutdown that Pedante says caught much of the Supernatural team by surprise.
Layoffs were always a possibility working in tech, she acknowledged, but many on the team didn’t expect it to happen when it did.
Former colleagues quickly created Discord servers and text groups to stay connected. Pedante said years of working together had produced genuine friendships across the company, including coaches, choreographers, engineers and others who had spent years building Supernatural together.
At the same time, something else was happening. Supernatural’s users, referred to within the service as “athletes,” were making it clear that they weren’t ready to lose it.
“There was this dual thing happening where we were all so sad and grieving and shocked and not sure what was going to happen next,” Pedante told UploadVR. “But then we were being inundated with so much love and support and sadness from the community.”
For some employees who had experienced layoffs elsewhere in the technology industry, the response was unlike anything they’d encountered before.
“I had many colleagues who had been through layoffs before say, ‘This is not like any other layoff,'” Pedante recalled.
Athletes wrote about relationships they’d formed, changes they’d made in their lives and what Supernatural’s coaches and community had come to mean to them.
Pedante described the response as “a salve to our own individual pain.”
But it did something else too. It showed the former team that there was still considerable demand for what they had built.
The Community Refused To Move On
In the months after the layoffs, Supernatural athletes organized petitions, filled social media with calls to save the service and looked for ways to make their objections heard.
A Change.org petition launched the day after the shutdown was announced ultimately drew more than 7,800 supporters. Among its requests was that Meta either allow the team to continue Supernatural within the company or permit it to spin off independently so the experience could survive.
The campaign extended beyond petitions and social media. At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March, Supernatural athlete Cheryl Briggs approached Meta Director of Games Chris Pruett following a conference session to make the case for the service. According to Briggs’ subsequent account in the official Supernatural Facebook group, Pruett gave her his personal email and invited her to send him feedback.
Briggs later shared the email she sent Pruett, which incorporated feedback from other Supernatural athletes and argued that Meta should consider Supernatural as a broader health and wellness platform rather than simply a VR fitness game.
Months later, Meta announced that Supernatural would continue under a newly formed independent company.
There’s no evidence that Briggs’ outreach, the petition, or any individual community effort led Meta to that decision. Meta did, however, acknowledge the broader community response in its June announcement.
“We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear over the last few months,” Meta told the Supernatural community, adding that it had been “working hard to find a path forward.”
Pedante was more definitive about the effect that response had on the former Supernatural team.
“If the layoffs happened and the community quickly moved on and they were like, ‘Okay, cool. What’s next?’ I don’t think we would be doing what we’re doing right now,” she told UploadVR.
“We’re only doing this because all of those people, the people who we built relationships with and who came to trust us, said we still need you.”
The community provided a reason to try, and Supernatural’s original founders and returning team were willing to try. But none of it could have produced an independent Supernatural without Meta allowing a path forward.
Rather than simply allowing the service to wind down, Meta announced in June that Supernatural Health, a new independent company, would “take over the Supernatural experience.”
Meta hasn’t publicly detailed what led to that decision. Its announcement establishes the outcome and acknowledges the community response, but stops short of explaining how or why the agreement came together.
What emerged from that process bears little resemblance in scale to the Supernatural organization Pedante left in January.
From Nearly 200 People To About 15
“At our biggest we were almost 200 people staff and now we’re about 15,” Pedante told UploadVR.
That dramatic reduction is shaping how the new Supernatural operates.
Some of the differences are obvious. A team of roughly 15 people doesn’t have anything approaching the resources of Meta. Pedante readily acknowledged that being small comes with limitations.
But it has also restored something she remembers from Supernatural’s earliest years: the ability to move quickly.
Pedante pointed to recent athlete meetups in Denver and Seattle. The team went from deciding it wanted to organize them to holding both events within roughly three weeks.
“I don’t think we could have done that at a big company,” she said.
That smaller scale is also giving the team an opportunity to reconsider assumptions built up over years of developing Supernatural.
For now, however, experimentation isn’t the first priority.
The immediate challenge is getting Supernatural from where it is today to a new independent app this fall without losing what made people fight to keep it alive.
Denver Athlete Meetup (L), Supernatural Athlete Jen Boyer with Coach Leanne Pedante (R), Photos: Supernatural
What Makes Supernatural Supernatural?
Rebuilding with fewer people creates opportunities to reconsider how Supernatural is made, but Pedante says some parts of the experience aren’t up for debate.
She pointed to the environments, coaches, choreographers and music as defining elements of Supernatural.
“Those are non-negotiables,” Pedante told UploadVR. “Those are the hallmarks of Supernatural.”
That continuity extends to Supernatural’s coaching team. All six current coaches are making the move to the independent app: Antonio Harrison, Mindy Lai, Raneir Pollard, Mark Harari, Dwana Olsen and Pedante.
For athletes who have spent years working out alongside those coaches, their return provides one of the clearest links between the Supernatural they know and the independent version being built now.
That distinction is important for a team simultaneously trying to preserve an experience and rebuild the organization responsible for creating it.
Pedante described the process as an opportunity to examine decisions that accumulated over years of development.
“Are we doing this because it’s always the way we’ve done it or are we doing this because it is the best way to do it?” she said.
It’s a question Pedante sees as surprisingly similar to the ones Supernatural coaches have spent years asking athletes.
“One of the biggest things we do as coaches is try to get you to understand that all the stories you tell yourself about your own limitations might not be true,” she said.
Now the team is applying some of that thinking to itself.
For the immediate future, though, Pedante says the priority is continuity rather than reinvention.
“We are just trying to make sure that we can keep delivering what we’ve been delivering,” she said.
The bigger experiments can come later.
Moving Athletes To A New Supernatural
That continuity will soon face a practical test.
Meta’s existing Supernatural app will remain available until December 3, 2026. Supernatural Health expects its new independent app to arrive on the Meta Horizon Store this fall.
That means existing athletes won’t simply wake up one morning to find the same app under new ownership. They’ll need to move to an entirely new Supernatural app.
Pedante acknowledged that the transition could create some confusion, particularly for athletes who have spent years accumulating workout histories, streaks and achievements.
Whether all of that history can follow them remains unresolved.
“We are working on it,” Pedante told UploadVR when asked whether those records could transfer to the new app.
“I can’t promise anything,” she added, explaining that the team is still working through the technical considerations involved.
For a service where some athletes have accumulated years of history, that could be a significant part of the transition.
Pedante says the smaller team intends to be directly involved in helping athletes through it.
“Every single person on this team will be involved in customer support and the community support,” she said. “We will do our absolute best to hold people’s hands through the process.”
More information will arrive as the new app gets closer to release. Pedante also hinted that the team has additional initiatives planned before launch, though she wasn’t ready to discuss them yet.
For now, the challenge is straightforward to describe and considerably harder to execute: move a community from a Meta-owned service into a new independent Supernatural without losing the things that made them want to follow it there.
Registration is open for a Founding Membership through Supernatural Health’s website. There’s no payment or obligation to join now, but registering locks in a discounted annual rate of $180 for the first year. Standard pricing for the new app will be $20 per month or $200 annually.
Pedante said those registrations serve another purpose for the small team rebuilding Supernatural: they provide an early indication of how much of the existing community intends to make the move.
“It is helpful for us to have a sense of how many people are coming with us,” Pedante told UploadVR.
Why Bring It Back?
As a regular Supernatural athlete myself, I felt some of that loss firsthand. After the shutdown was announced, returning to the app felt different. The workouts were still there, but something about the experience felt hollow, almost like returning to a familiar place after the people who made it feel alive were gone.
I wasn’t alone in feeling that loss. The response to Supernatural’s shutdown surprised even some of the people who built it.
Pedante believes part of that attachment comes from athletes finding something they hadn’t experienced in other forms of fitness.
“There’s a safety that people feel in moving their bodies in this fitness environment that they didn’t find in other places,” Pedante said.
Supernatural athlete Chesney Mariani shares how she went from struggling to find a fitness routine that worked for her to becoming a guest coach.
She pointed to inclusiveness, connection and trust as qualities people may not realize they’ve been missing.
“You don’t even necessarily know what’s been lacking in the things you’ve tried before,” she said.
The challenge for the independent Supernatural will eventually extend beyond bringing its existing athletes into the new app. The team will also have to introduce the experience to people who have never tried it.
Pedante expects that process to happen gradually.
“One headset at a time, one aha moment at a time,” she said.
