New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 200 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series.
Company name: Racketware Limited
Founder(s): Dr Paul Mellor
Headquarters: Oxford, UK
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Racketware provides motion sensing solutions for racket sports, with a small lightweight sensor that clips to your racket and records the match as you play. It uses analysis of the data to provide full electronic coaching for every match.
2. Problem & Solution
Sport sensors today are almost literally “in the dark”, in that they can sense the racket moving but they don’t know where it is in the court or what the player is doing with it. Consequently they can only provide some basic stats like shot by shot analysis of racket head speed and a breakdown of forehand and backhand. It’s often the case that the data is often not very accurate as they don’t have a view of the court and what is happening in the match.
Racketware tracks the position and orientation of the racket around the court 500 times a second. So we know exactly where the player is in the court and exactly how they are moving, and – most importantly – where they are hitting the ball.
Because we have this extra information we’re able to build some powerful artificial intelligence routines to analyze the data and help players improve their play. We do this by detecting the player’s specific faults from a number of typical faults that coaches see in real play. We then track their progress and feed it back to them as they work on improving the faults we’ve detected.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
We’ve built our initial product around squash, but it’s very adaptable to all racket sports: tennis, badminton, racquetball and the like. It’s aimed at players who want to improve their game. Some will want to use the product in tandem with a real human coach, but others won’t necessarily want to make the time or financial commitment required to work with a coach, and will use Racketware as an e-coach.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Initially we’ll make money from the sales of the sensors, although later we are looking into the option to have a subscription model for match analysis.
5. Management Team – with titles
Racketware was founded by Dr Paul Mellor who now runs the company as the CEO.
6. Anything else you want the audience to know about your venture?
We think Racketware technology could add a lot of value to other existing sensor-based sports products. So we’re looking for opportunities to partner with others in order to fully exploit the technology across the widest range of sports markets possible.
New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This 
