Gavin David Free was born on May 23, 1988, in Thame, Oxfordshire, England, and attended Lord Williams’s School in the same town. Daniel “Dan” Gruchy was born on June 17, 1988, also in Thame; the two knew of each other from school but only became close after both took jobs at the same branch of Waitrose supermarket, as Gruchy’s biography records. Free’s route into filmmaking started in 2006, when he joined Green Door Films, one of Europe’s first companies to own a Vision Research Phantom high-speed camera, working as a data technician and camera operator on music videos and commercials for acts including U2, Kasabian, and The Chemical Brothers, according to his Wikipedia biography. Gruchy took a different path, serving as a Lance Corporal in the British Army before eventually moving into content creation full time.

Free and Gruchy posted their first Slow Mo Guys video on October 15, 2010, filming everyday phenomena on the Phantom cameras Free had access to through his day job. In April 2011 the channel won YouTube’s “On The Rise” award, and the following month their Giant 6ft Water Balloon video became their most-viewed upload, spawning an annual “Giant Balloon June” tradition that continues on the channel. A slow-motion watermelon-smashing video earned the duo a national television spot on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in September 2012, and by the mid-2010s the channel had become the largest dedicated high-speed-camera channel on YouTube. Free’s career developed in parallel: in 2009 he had already joined Austin, Texas-based Rooster Teeth Productions to direct season seven of the machinima series Red vs. Blue and its miniseries Relocated, giving him a second, overlapping career track alongside the channel he ran with Gruchy from England.

Free became a full member of Rooster Teeth’s Achievement Hunter gaming division in February 2012, appearing regularly in its videos and the Off Topic podcast, and in February 2013 he and Rooster Teeth struck a deal in which Free retained sole ownership of The Slow Mo Guys while granting the company broadcast rights — an early business decision that kept the channel’s revenue and intellectual property under his control even as his Rooster Teeth profile grew. He served briefly as Rooster Teeth’s creative director from October 2015 to early 2016. Alongside his YouTube and gaming work, Free built a separate cinematography career, with high-speed camera credits on Hot Fuzz (2007), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), and Dredd (2012), plus work for BBC’s Top Gear; he also voiced Vav in the animated series X-Ray and Vav and Scarlet David in RWBY, and starred as Woody in Rooster Teeth’s Lazer Team (2016) and its sequel. Gruchy, meanwhile, kept contributing to the channel from England during his military service before announcing at the RTX 2016 convention that he planned to relocate to Austin, which he did by spring 2017, becoming a full-time, on-camera co-host rather than an occasional contributor. The channel itself kept growing through this period, passing 11 million subscribers and 1.5 billion views by 2018 and 14 million subscribers and 2.2 billion views by 2022, the year its first television commission, The Slow Mo Guys’ Big Adventures, debuted on Sky Kids. Rooster Teeth’s story ended less happily: Achievement Hunter announced its disbandment in September 2023 after 15 years, publishing a final farewell video on October 1, 2023, and Rooster Teeth itself was shut down entirely by parent company Warner Bros. Discovery in May 2024. Free married his longtime partner, fellow content creator Meg Turney, in England later that year. In 2025, Rooster Teeth co-founder Burnie Burns’ new venture, Box Canyon Productions, acquired the core Rooster Teeth intellectual property and assets from Warner Bros. Discovery, though the deal explicitly excluded Achievement Hunter and Funhaus, whose rights remained with Warner Bros. Discovery — meaning Free’s own Achievement Hunter-era work sits outside the revived company. Through all of this, The Slow Mo Guys channel continued operating independently of Rooster Teeth’s collapse, reaching roughly 15 million subscribers and 2.7 billion views by mid-2026.

Because Free and Gruchy have never published channel financials, third-party YouTube earnings estimators are the only available source for annual income figures, and they vary widely. NetworthSpot estimates the channel’s monthly viewership at roughly 10.4 million views, which at typical creator ad rates of $3-7 per thousand monetized views works out to an estimated $624,100 in yearly ad revenue, with a stated high-end range above $1.1 million. Naibuzz separately estimates average daily ad revenue of about $2,400, or roughly $880,000 a year, using a broader $2-12 per-thousand-views range. These figures describe gross channel-level YouTube ad revenue only, split in some undisclosed proportion between Free — who owns the channel outright under the 2013 Rooster Teeth agreement — and Gruchy as co-host, and they exclude Free’s separate, never-disclosed Rooster Teeth salary and equity, film cinematography fees, and any Lazer Team compensation. No source publishes a verified, audited annual income figure for either creator individually.

The clearest documented contract in the channel’s history is the February 2013 agreement under which Free retained full ownership of The Slow Mo Guys while granting Rooster Teeth broadcast rights to the content — financial terms were not disclosed. The channel later moved into paid platform deals with two YouTube Originals productions, The Super Slow Show (2018) and Planet Slow Mo (2019), both larger-budget series featuring celebrity guests and international travel; an eight-part The Slow Mo Guys VR series followed for Oculus TV in March 2020. Its first linear television commission, The Slow Mo Guys’ Big Adventures, launched on Sky Kids in September 2022. None of these deals’ fees have been made public. On the production side, workstation manufacturer Puget Systems published a case study describing a custom dual-RTX-6000, 96-terabyte RAID storage system it built for the channel to handle 8K Phantom camera footage and eliminate editing bottlenecks across Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro — a production-infrastructure relationship rather than a disclosed cash sponsorship, but one that illustrates the scale of the channel’s technical operation.

Samsung featured Free and Gruchy in a 2018 interview and marketing campaign tied to the Galaxy S9’s “Super Slow-Mo” camera feature, one of the channel’s more prominent brand tie-ins given the direct overlap with its high-speed-video subject matter. Naibuzz’s revenue breakdown separately names Ubisoft, GoGurt, and Lenovo as brands that have paid for video mentions, though none of these deals’ terms or exact dates are independently documented in trade press. Earlier, in January 2014, the channel collaborated with GE Global Research on videos exploring superhydrophobic surfaces and magnetic nanoparticles, a branded-science partnership rather than a straightforward product endorsement, as noted on the channel’s Wikipedia page. YouTube itself also featured the channel in its 2014 “You Make Every Epic” advertising campaign, including placements on London buses — platform promotion rather than a brand-paid endorsement, but a sign of how YouTube valued the channel’s profile at the time.

The most significant business venture tied to Free is Lazer Team, a Rooster Teeth-produced science-fiction comedy he starred in alongside Burnie Burns and other Rooster Teeth personalities. Its 2014 Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign raised $2.48 million from more than 37,000 backers, over four times its goal and, at the time, one of the largest film-crowdfunding campaigns ever run. Released as a YouTube Red Original in 2016, the film scored roughly $1 million in advance Tugg on-demand theatrical presales in January 2016 and went on to a reported $1.6 million box office. Free’s role was as star and creative contributor rather than a disclosed financial backer, so no ownership stake or investment return can be sourced for him specifically. The Slow Mo Guys also operates a self-branded merchandise store selling t-shirts and other branded products directly to fans. No independently verified separate production company, restaurant, technology investment, or other outside business founded or majority-owned by Free or Gruchy is documented in reliable reporting beyond these two ventures.

Free has lived in Austin, Texas — Rooster Teeth’s home city — since at least the mid-2010s, sharing a home there with now-wife Meg Turney. That home became national news in January 2018 when an armed fan broke in during an attempted attack on Free; both he and Turney sheltered safely while police fatally shot the intruder in their driveway. No purchase price or other property details for that home, or for any other real estate belonging to Free or Gruchy, have been documented in reliable public reporting, so no figures are given here. Gruchy relocated to Austin around 2017 for the channel’s production needs, but no property or asset details specific to him have been independently reported.