With its AI-based software that transforms videos from smartphones into professional-quality sports videos, We Play Sport has attracted investors from DART Labs Ventures. The Lausanne-based startup will also benefit from the investor’s support via its acceleration program to bring its solution to the next level.
We Play Sport is building the tools to allow anybody to capture, view, and share high-quality videos of sports matches, embedding professional sports broadcasting features and building a sporting archive for teams and athletes that never had one. Today, broadcasting high-quality sports videos is only available to professionals, and alternative solutions and editing software for quality results are expensive for amateur leagues, clubs, and athletes.
Founded by Adam Scholefield and Matt Bowden, who played water polo sports, We Play Sport developed the MatchCapture app. The platform uses artificial intelligence algorithms that automatically detect important events in a fast-moving sports match like goals, passes, and shots from smartphone footage. Using the obtained data, the app generates high-quality videos for players, their friends and family to view, share, and discuss on a social platform. The app also provides automated highlights videos and statistics to help players track performance and compare with other athletes. Requirements to use the service: two smartphones to film the match and send the video to a platform for analysis.
The first version of the app was recently launched, and the enthusiasm from users is high – the average app user spends over one hour per month on the platform, as revealed by Matt in an interview with Doug Griffin, Partner at Dart Labs Ventures. While in the beta phase over 1400 users, clubs such as the British Water Polo League (BWPL) and Libellule de Paris, one of France’s oldest swimming and water polo clubs and more in the UK, France, Switzerland, Spain, Taiwan, and New Zealand, have tested the solution. The official launch is expected in September, which marks the start of the 2022/23 sporting season. The startup plans to support more users in the water sports segment upon launching and later extend the solution to other sports such as basketball and volleyball.
The fresh investment from Dart Labs, which enables the startup to expand the team and develop its algorithms, comes with the opportunity to join the Dart accelerator programme to further enhance their technology and get access to the Dart network.
(RAN)
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