Irish sport-tech companies are becoming internationally known as leaders in their professional fields.  Most started out small and ended up becoming prominent players in the industry.

This is the case for SportLoMo, a Co Mayo based company that provides management software to sport organisations. They began with a client list of some of the local GAA clubs. Now, the company has signed a deal with a US sports organisation that will yield 3,000 new customers.

In recent months, many of these Irish sport tech firms have secured lucrative international deals, while others are gearing up to begin fundraising rounds to further grow their company.  Others, like Kairos, a compact established by the former Irish rugby international Andrew Trimble, have just entered the competitive sport tech sector. 

The Currency spoke to six of the most interesting names in Irish sport tech to see what their next moves are.

Kairos to seek further funding in 2020

Andrew Trimble and Gareth Quinn of Kairos.

Former Ireland rugby player Andrew Trimble’s sport-tech start-up Kairos will enter another fundraising round in 2020, having already closed a €700,000 investment round with venture capitalists in February this year. 

“Techstart NI led the round and they were supplemented by private investors, so we’ve got a nice bit of support there,” Trimble told The Currency.

The company is still using this money, and plans to do so until the middle of next year, to “build their engineering team and also bring in some commercial and product focus and put a machine together from a sales point of view”.

Next year, the company will return to the funding market to fuel further expansion, according to the company’s vice president for product and business development, Daniel Fearon.

Former Irish and Ulster Rugby player Andrew Trimble started to see issues when it came to athlete organisation during the twilight of his professional sporting career and started to put together a system for himself. This athletic management system is the foundation on which Kairos was built. 

“He would put some engineering and methodical thinking into how he would prepare himself throughout his entire week,” said Fearon.

He would do this with “the idea being that he would both be in a better place physically but most importantly mentally. He would know that he’s completed everything he needed to do to make sure that when it came to game day or game night that he would absolutely nail it,” Fearon said. 

This emphasis on organisation and the influence of people such as former Irish coach Joe Schmidt gave Trimble the idea for his company.

“It’s something I addressed when I was playing and then coming to the end of my career, I gave Gareth Quinn a shout. I knew he was in quite a significant tech network in Belfast,” Trimble said.

While participating in a 10k in a Belfast park he ran into Quinn who he knew, as both men sat on the board of Ireland Funds. Trimble pitched the idea to entrepreneur Quinn who founded the tech start up Digital DNA. Trimble’s intent was to create it just for the Ulster Rugby team. 

“When I approached Gareth my world was Ulster rugby and Ireland rugby obviously and I wanted to create a solution that was specific for my two workplaces,” said Trimble who was still professionally playing at the time.

“Why would you just do that for Ulster,” came the response.

The pair then officially established the company just over a year ago and received initial funding from Invest Northern Ireland which allowed them to work with some consulting agencies. 

They entered a partnership with international sport-tech giants StatSports in Newry and together they identified target customers.

“Let’s just say we’re targeting the Premiere League football world,” said Fearon.

Their customers at this point include Ulster Rugby and recently Michael O’Neill, manager of the Northern Irish football team, adopted the management system for the last Euro qualifiers. They are also breaking into GAA clubs across the country. 

“We found that without players buying and engagement in this, it kind of falls down very quickly,” said Fearon, who added that what makes Kairos different from other management systems is that it is targeted towards athletes personal use.

The Kairos app streamlines the whole process of everything around club organisation, including schedules and medical appointments, with the aim of being the sole interface between a player and a club. 

“We want to simplify and aggregate that data,” said Fearon who believes other systems available can be too intrusive on an athlete. 

“We spent loads of time chatting to different stakeholders and different sports, coaches, players, medics and managers to try and make sure we were able to create something compelling and viable rather than making something naively and hoping it would work,” said Trimble.  

The company hired just under nine full-time employees in the first year of business and plan on hitting 10 soon. 

StatSports planning further international growth, and a a possible IPO

Barcelona footballer Lionel Messi using a StatSports device.

Brazil. Barcelona. Liverpool. The client list of Newry based StatSport is a roll call of global sporting leaders. And the newest addition to the roster is now Indian cricket.

StatsSports recently signed a new deal with India Cricket, confirmed a company spokesperson. 

The sport-tech company, based in Newry in Northern Ireland, focuses on minimising sport injury through using GPS technology to track an athlete’s performance.

“The Indian Cricket deal opens a big market for us around the subcontinent where tech companies are booming right now,” said a company spokesperson. 

The overall focus of the company is on analysing the output and input of an athlete’s performance in an effort to reduce the risk of injury. To achieve this, the company provides a team performance software called Apex Pro Series, which allows sport franchises to measure and monitor their athlete’s performance through a GPS tracking device. If an injury already exists, this software provides a recovery process. 

The company also provides athletes themselves with an app called Apex Athlete Series, where they can track their own performance via the Apex pod. By using this app, all the vital metrics that Cristiano Ronaldo, Raheem Sterling, Neymar, and Kylian Mbappe use on the elite version at their clubs will be available to see.

The India Cricket deal is not their only partnership abroad. Last year, they secured a five-year contract with the US Soccer Federation and StatSports also provide clubs including Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal, Manchester City, Barcelona and Juventus with their tracking technology. 

England internationals Raheem Sterling and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain also recently became seven-figure investors and global ambassadors for the company.

“Both players have worked with our technology for the entirety of their careers and understand what a vital role it plays in sport,” said a StatSports spokesperson.

American football teams, the Irish Rugby Football Union, the GAA, hockey and basketball teams also use StatSports products. 

The origin for the company dates back to when the founders, Sean O’Connor and Alan Clarke, met at an amateur football game in Dundalk 10 years ago. After they spoke, they realised there was a gap in the market for high-performance sport tech. 

O’Connor studied sport injury in Sheffield Hallam University and Clarke studied mechanical engineering in Dundalk Institute of Technology before they created the company StatSports in 2007, just before the global economic downturn. Despite this, the company was completely funded by Clarke and O’Connor, according to the spokesperson. 

The company is now valued at approximately €200 million and is currently looking at the possibility of an Initial Public Offering (IPO) by the end of the next two years.

Currently 120 people work in the Newry headquarters, with further staff in the company’s Chicago and Sydney offices.

Orreco’s finger is on the pulse as they prepare for new deals

Dr Brian Moore, founder of Orreco.

Orreco has entered into a series of new partnerships and agreements with teams and organisation, details of which will be announced shortly.

The biomarker company based in Galway analyses blood from athletes to see ways their performance can be optimised. They recently became more focused on Fem Tech after the international success one of their products: the FitrWoman app, which tracks female athlete performance around the menstrual cycle and for everyday training.

“Orreco has also developed FitrCoach to revolutionise how teams and coaches care for female athletes,” said a spokesperson for the company.

Orreco and their partners Strava recently created the largest global survey ever completed by exercising females. The data collected showed 81.5 per cent of these athletes never discussed their menstrual cycle with their coach. Despite 57 per cent of those who completed the survey stated they feel their performance is reduced at certain points of their menstrual cycle. Only 20 per cent received any education about sport and the menstrual cycle. The research was carried out in the UK and Ireland. 

The company recently worked with the US Women’s World Cup winning soccer team (USWNT) and in Ireland it partnered with Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) through FitrWoman.

USA Swimming was the first major global national governing body to partner with the FitrWoman app. From this partnership, the staff of the team had to deliver coach and athlete education workshops and conduct swimming-specific research for the specialised area of athletes with periods. 

The company does not just produce individual and personalised solutions for female athletes but does this across the board in various ways for athletes in a range of sports.

Their client base also includes NBA franchises such as the Atlanta Hawks, individual players, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), Newcastle United FC and Red Bull High Performance. Tottenham Hotspur  also just signed a deal to work with Orreco.

Orreco creates these athlete plans by looking at sets of data such as GPS data, wellness data, training statistics and others.

Two of the company’s main bio-analytics products are called Zone and TrackOr. These help support and accelerate player recovery and optimise game-time performance. The overall aim of the company is to understand the relationship between bio-markers, wearable technology and performance analytics. This helps prolong an athlete’s career for as long as possible and gives coaches and players information on the optimal workloads for a sportsperson’s body. The information gleaned from the blood is analysed by Orreco to help make real-time data-driven decisions leveraging bio markers and artificial intelligence. 

In 2017, Orreco opened a new high-tech office within the campus of Sports Rehab Los Angeles, a leading sports training and recovery center in America. 

“Our new home in LA will allow us to deliver a truly world-leading offering for elite athletes in the United States, a significant market for us,” said Orreco CEO and sport scientist Dr Brian Moore.

Enterprise Ireland CEO Julie Sinnamon helped open their new office which is is also home to a new data and performance portal developed by IBM with Orreco called IBM Sports Insights Central, which lists a select number of NBA players and is used by all the major NBA teams and agents.

The company was founded in 2010 in Sligo by Moore and Consultant Hematologist Dr Andrew Hodgson, who have over 30 years of combined research in the field of clinical and applied sports science. Yet Moore was already becoming a leading name in athlete performance analysis having worked with Sonia O’Sullivan at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.

While studying at Strawberry Hill in London, Moore met Kenyan athlete Mises Kiptanui and became interested in understanding East Africa’s dominance of running. 

Moore did his PhD under professor Craig Sharp, credited with creating modern sports science and who held the record for the fastest ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro.

Moore studied biomarker technology and how to combine it with analytics to get a full picture around blood volume, nutrition, sleep and build sports performance models for professional athletes. 

The company got off the ground after investment from champion golfers Graeme McDowell and Padraig Harrington. Since then, the company raised capital from private investors during a series of funding rounds which amounted to €5.5 million over the years. 

Another investor is Silicon Valley-based venture firm True Ventures, which backed Fitbit and Peleton in their early days. Irish angel investors of the company included former Amazon VP of Technology Tom Killalea, Pa Nolan formerly of Fexco, former chairman of Vodafone Brian Patterson and Kevin Toland the CEO of Aryzta, formerly of DAA. 

Kitman Labs reveals plans for 2020

Kitman Labs chief executive Stephen Smith.

Kitman Labs will launch two new analytical software products in early 2020, according to the company founder and chief executive Stephen Smith.

The software aims to plan an entire future season for an athlete in advance, rather than relying on recent training sessions or seasons to map out further progression.

The products will be “data-driven long-term strategic planning” while concentrating on “day-to-day” activity by an athlete, Smith told The Currency.

Kitman Labs uses analytics tools to create software which provides information about an athlete’s performance and their risk of injury.

The company targets the coaching staff, sports scientists, medics involved with an athlete or a team that uses the company. The product allows them to collate all the data they are collecting on the athletes in one, centralised platform. This gives every staff member and overview on the status and performance of each athlete/team as a whole.

“It allows practitioners to make better decisions for their athletes” which will “keep them healthy and keep them on the field,” said Smith. 

The company was originally set up in 2012 but got off the ground in 2014 as its founder, Smith, was still devoting time to Leinster rugby as the team’s strength and conditioning coach in the early days. The development of the company was inspired by Smith’s thesis on combined risk factors when it comes to sport injury. 

Enterprise Ireland helped get the company on its feet with initial funding as well as receiving €400,000 in an angel round before they started looking at venture funding. In total the company raised a total of €20 million after several fundraising rounds and have international private and public investors such as Pete Knight from CheckFree.

The English Premiership, German Bundesliga and Chinese Super League are among the big names that use Kitman Labs software. The American National Hockey League, Major League Baseball and Irish rugby teams also use it. Recently, some mixed martial arts athletes have been using the software, according to Smith. 

Kitman Labs software is used by an estimated 250 teams in various countries including the United States, Canada, Japan, China and Ireland. 

The company employs 50 people across its two offices in California and in Dublin.

SportLoMo looking to break into the US

Vivienne Lee , co-founder of SportsLomo, with angel investors Gerard Barry and John Mullen, and SportsLoMo co-founder Seamus Kyne.

Mayo company SportLoMo finalised a new deal in the United States which will bring 3,000 clubs and 130,000 players into using their management software. 

The company’s chief executive Seamus Kyne made a detour to Colorado in August to iron out the last details of the deal before going to Vancouver to speak with other SportLoMo clients. 

“We have signed a big contract in the States,” said Kyne’s business partner and wife Vivienne Kyne. “It’s one of the smaller sports over there but it still has huge numbers,” she hinted. 

SportLoMo started out as a competition management system. Although it has added other elements to their business, the company’s focus now is on membership registration (which requires a licence fee), events and electronic game management. Their software is used by sports organisations to manage details of fixtures, results, umpire management and more by communicating directly with clubs, teams and broader organisations. 

Before SportLoMo’s service, sport organisations were relying heavily on what was printed in local publications for this information but sports administrators manage this information by using SportLoMo’s software platform. The data is then publicised via various websites, API feeds (application programming interface) and social media.

“This is a biggie for us,” said Vivienne Kyne when discussing their latest deal. 

SportLoMo entered the race late to go into business with their new American based sport organisation. The shortlist had already been whittled down to two but after seeing the SportLoMo demo pitch the number increased to three and the underdog from the west of Ireland was the winner. 

“Our market is really abroad at this stage.  We don’t generally advertise in Ireland. We haven’t the budget to advertise in Ireland,” said Vivienne Kyne. She added that Canada is where most of their attention is placed. 

“We have some nice clients up there and some more bubbling,” said Kyne as she spoke about their current Canadian market where they did a deal previously with Canada Rugby. 

Other organisations they work with include the IRFU, Cork GAA, Dublin GAA, Volleyball British Columbia, Softball Ontario, England Hockey and three big hockey associations in Australia.

Other organisations using their software include junior elite soccer in England, Scotland Basketball & Snowsports and Australian Futsal. 

Rugby is where their focus is. Along with the IRFU, Portugese, Switzerland, Austria and Canada Rugby also use SportLoMo. Canada is their main market outside of Europe.  

“The IRFU here in Ireland, every single domestic game right down to underage goes through our system for team sheets, fixtures, results and referees,” said Vivienne Kyne. 

Setting up a business in the mid-sized town Castlbar and seeing it evolve into an international success remains a point of pride for Vivienne Kyne. 

“It’s a nice business, it’s pretty cool,” she said.  

Even with big names abroad using their software, she said that grassroutes small Irish clubs use their system. They are still involved with the Castlebar Mitchels local GAA team and Mayo GAA.  

The company got off the ground with their own funds but later, the married couple and business partners, went through two rounds of funding where they received financial support from Enterprise Ireland and private investors. 

“We still own a good portion of the company but we’ve had two rounds of funding just to help us grow,” said Vivenne Kyne. 

This money was spent on recruitment, computer servers and expanding the business. Little was needed for tangible assets as their system uses cloud software. 

SportLoMo currently employs 13 people in their headquarters in Castlebar and have 19 staff in total.

Cobraw ready to bite back

Conor Teehan and John Broderick officially dissolved their sport retail company Cobraw last year but are planning to regenerate it. 

Cobraw created form fitting sport-wear for indoor and outdoor athletes with the aim of improving performance. They now plan to have a technical side to their company as well as a clothing element. 

“Ignorance of everything involved with manufacturing, marketing, sales and re-design,” is what Teehan attributed the failing of Cobraw to. “Essentially, we did not have a high enough sales rate to continue,” he continued.

Teehan is now considering re-booting the business and is currently in a design stage and working on new smart clothing linked with apps which would assist people’s recovery from leg injuries. 

“Instead of having a product that is vague in its application, we may attempt to align our brand with a slightly different sector,” said Teehan.

Cobraw created clothing with certain properties to aid an athlete’s performance. For example, their Cobraw X-TIGHTS Compression Pants which targeted muscle and joint areas were meant to make training more comfortable. 

“The idea to set up Cobraw was to offer potential customers a product(s) that would actually benefit them, at a fair price point, with a transparent price structure and without putting money in the pockets of uninformed influencers to garner attention,” said Teehan. 

“The original business was built on designing functional and fashionable sports clothing in Ireland and, for the first few orders, manufacturing in Asia,” he added.

They have not yet been in contact with any investors but are building prototypes and looking at market options before attempting to raise money.