Spotlight on Israeli Sports Tech In Time for the World Cup

It’s the “Mundial” season, and while you won’t see an Israeli squad on the field, there’s plenty of Israeli tech playing in the media/sports game. The number of Israeli sport-tech companies more than doubled in recent years, with over 103 active startups ranging from AR/VR technology to hydration management and motion tracking sensors.

According to Startup Nation Central, there are over 103 active startups in the sports tech space in Israel, most of them are early stage. 34% are still bootstrapped, and 35% are in the seed stage.  Israel’s strength in computer vision and image/video analysis has contributed to the creation of a number of startups in the sports tech arena among other industries.

There’s already been a few modest success stories too: Replay Technologies was sold to Intel for $175M, offering slow motion, multi angle replays (resembling a scene from “The Matrix”). In August 2017, Nielsen acquired vBrand, machine learning-enabled platform to measure brand exposure and impact in sports programming. The vBrand tech allows brands and rights holders to monitor and track sponsorship visibility within hours of an event and make adjustments to digital signage and social campaigns within a game/season. In April 2018, Nike bought Invertex, an Israeli startup that uses 3D images and AI to analyze users’ feet and suggest shoe models and sizes for best fit.

Below is a shoutout to Israeli startups doing interesting things in the sports tech arena:

Minute Media (founded 2011) – possibly the largest media /sports company to come out of Israel (disclosure: I’m an investor via Remagine Ventures), Minute Media created the world’s largest football publisher via 90min,  DBLTAP, the esports brand focused on stories beyond the stage; and 12up, the U.S. sports brand at the intersection of sports and pop culture. It reaches 80 million unique users across its platform and showcases curated user generated content from its editorial staff as well as 5,000 engaged sport fans. The company has raised a total of $77M to date, including the latest round of  $17M led by Goldman Sachs and return investors Battery Ventures.

Playsight

(founded 2010)- Sports video analytics. PlaySight’s camera-and-kiosk system is built with analytics technology that turns any court into a SmartCourt, offering line calling, live streaming, instant multi-angle video replays, and detailed statistics. PlaySight is recognized by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) as a Player Analysis Technology and is approved for use in all ITF-sanctioned tournaments.

WSC Sports (founded 2011) – WSC’s video technologies analyze sports broadcasts in real time, identify every component of a game, and generate customized highlights of every player, team, and moment. Ranked as the 7th fastest growing Israeli company according to Deloitte Fast50, WSC Sports raised $12.5M from Intel Capital, Plus Ventures and private Investors.

Udobu – udobu works with top sports clubs to help fill stadiums, using its proprietary fan behavior prediction technology. With udobu, users can segment and target their fans based on their predicted behavior in upcoming games.

 

Pixellot – Ultra high resolution unmanned video solutions. Pixellot streamlines the production workflow by deploying an unmanned, multi-camera system in a single, fixed rig (with additional angles as required), to cover the entire field, offering a stitched panoramic image. Advanced auto-production enables automatic coverage of the flow of play.

Clearvuze – scenes from a drone – ClearVuze is building software that autonomously controls drones and positions them to

capture video of the environment below. The video is then processed to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the scene, using structure-from-motion, machine learning, and tracking algorithms. This enables the company to provide customers with high-level, customized analytics derived from the video data and tailored to their particular use cases.

Texel –

get the best seat in the house, in VR.  Texel provides a white-label VR provisioning solution for broadcasters or content owners. Texel’s goal is to help in the provisioning of live, immersive virtual reality experiences, specifically targeting live sports and entertainment content. The company offers 360-degree video-resolution quality and a per-frame, millisecond synch between viewer groups, allowing friends in different locations to virtually attend an event together despite the different networks in between.

Peer5 –

peer to peer CDN. Peer5 is building a decentralized hybrid server/P2P CDN that delivers content quickly and with remarkable resilience during times when servers feel stress. Due in part to revolutionary HTML5 and WebRTC technologies, Peer5 has been able to successfully create a P2P architecture that can be used directly in-browser without any clients or plug-ins.

Minute – 

Minute is a video optimization technology company that provides viewers with smart highlights of the best video content on the web. Minute analyzes newly published videos while automatically and independently generating engaging highlight trailers to replace static, uninspiring, and uninformative video thumbnails.

Finally, here’s a bit of snapshot of the Israeli sportstech landscape, courtesy of Ben Penkert:

Israeli sports tech landscape (source: SportsTechX)