Start-ups in Ireland have been on the move with lot of interesting ideas finding shape and capturing the markets across the globe. The Start-ups ecosystem in Ireland plays a vital role in providing a great launch pad for people who are venturing into the entrepreneurial journey.

One of the sectors which has seen significant traction in the last few years is the Sports Tech industry. The ease of access to tech and impact of Artificial Intelligence adds to the surge in the number of start-ups entering this sector.

The Sports Tech industry has already seen start-ups from Ireland making a global impact. This includes Orreco, Kitman Labs, Tixserve, Output Sports, Wiistream, etc. Enterprise Ireland had published an article about the leading Sports Tech start-ups in Ireland.

Emma Meehan, the founder of Precision Sports Technology, in this latest edition of PAC Talks interview talks about the journey, right from selling breakfast rolls at the age of 12, understanding the business environment and now being the founder of an early stage start-up. The interview also captures the support available in Ireland for start-ups, the team at Precision, investors on board, the awards. We also spoke about her interests about music , Emma’s favourites bands, etc. Precision Sports Technology is already been tested by teams in the English Premier League, NBA, NFL and League of Ireland.

You can listen to the complete interview here: Apple, Spotify

Talking about her early years, Emma said “I started learning to code at age 12, which is also the same time that I started working. My father owns retail business. So from a young age, I was kind of immersed in the business environment, talking to people selling, not selling technology, but selling breakfast rolls and things like that. So I kind of learned that hard working mindset from that age. “

Emma enrolled for university for computer science and information Technology in 2014 . It was during this time, she started getting into fitness. While pursuing her education at the university she got the idea which later gave the launch pad for Precision Sports Technology. It was interesting to listen to Emma speak about the initial journey:-

“So as a child and as a teenager, I was actually extremely unathletic and unfit. Through school, we were only ever taught about soccer, basketball, Gaelic sports. Like I’m naturally a very, very poor runner, very uncoordinated. And I thought, oh, sports is never going to be the thing for me. But only when I started university, I figured out, like, I love weightlifting and I love Muay Thai because I’m not trying to get on the team. All I have to do is trying to improve from myself the day before and I just got hooked, really, really involved in the numbers. And then when I was coming towards the end of my university degree, after I done my internship in Cisco, I was thinking about the problems that I was facing myself in the gym. So throughout this time, I had gotten a personal trainer qualification. I had spent probably hundreds of hours researching about weightlifting, learning about it, even outside of the gym. So when I was looking at myself in the mirror and seeing my technique going wrong, I knew how to fix it. But I know that most people don’t. They either pay a lot of money for a coach. They lose confidence and stop working out, whether that’s in the gym or doing physiotherapy, or they actually push themselves too hard and end up injuring themselves. So I thought, well, technology can drive cars now. Surely it can help us with our technique when exercising. So that’s where the original idea came from and I built the very first prototype using the Xbox Kinect, a game like I loved playing with it, and I realised that if you plug it into your PC, you can get the SDK up for basic skeleton tracking. “

Emma went on to build this as a final year engineering project and her professors suggested to build a start-up out of this product. She however went on to work with Cisco , where she had done her internship as well, for three years and finally it was in 2021 the decision was made to go all out with her start-up.

The Galway based start-up uses the LIDAR (Light detection and ranging) technology to provide real time exercise feedback. They are using the new iPhone and iPad Pro models. It sends out a laser scan of the room to capture a 3D scan of the space. They’re using the combination of this 3D data and the computer vision data to give accurate, super fast body tracking on the device. This helps them to do real time feedback on the device.

Precision Sports Technology launched their first product ‘KinetikIQ‘, two weeks ago. They have rolled out in Ireland, Portugal, USA and UK. The target segment for now are the professional sports clubs. The initial users include some of the clubs in NBA, NFL, English Premier League, League of Ireland.

Emma explained this in detail:- “So we’re releasing our product in three key versions. So our main aim our North Star is for real time exercise feedback and analysis. So everyone who is doing physiotherapy at home or training in the gym that they can get live, completely individualised feedback on their movement patterns so they can stop injury risk and then maximise their results. Whether that’s getting fit, getting strong or reducing their pain from an injury or something like this. So we’re building up the machine learning algorithm around this, and we’re a very small team. So to get to this stage there’s a lot of product that needs to be built behind that. So version one, which is the version that we released just two weeks ago into the App Store, is for objective movement analysis. So this product is very specifically for professional strength conditioning coaches and physiotherapists. So what this product does is they just hit record on the app and they stop and immediately they get key results on their athletes movement patterns. So the information they get back is things like range of motion for the exercise, the speed, the stability of the joints, any asymmetries between the joints. So they have the kind of background knowledge to know, okay, if I see this asymmetry between the right and the left side, how should I improve on this? And is it something that I actually need to improve on because everybody’s body is completely different. There is no such thing as a perfect exercise technique. So we’re building out that repository to then give that individualised real time feedback later on. So we have this product now for professional coaches and then the next phase then before the real time feedback is for remote monitoring. So if you are going through a physiotherapy program your physiotherapist can say okay here’s your program. If you use the app while you’re doing your program, I can know, are you doing your exercises? Are you doing them correctly? And is there anything that I need to intervene on? So, you know, they may not have to go to the physiotherapists office as often and get better results. So there’s a bit of a product roadmap in there. But the version we have now is getting really, really good traction with these professional sports teams. “

While speaking about the immediate milestones, Emma added “Three key milestones: 1. closing our pre seed funds which is almost completed and is in the last couple of weeks before the doors are closed , 2. focus on the sales & 3. finally the third being the product.

Emma touched up on the importance of the strong start-up ecosystem present in Ireland which has been of great support.

Emma travelled to the USA recently with Awaken Hub team for meeting potential investors. Awaken Hub extended support and trained Emma to prepare a 60 seconds pitch with no slides. The start-up founder was surprised to learn from Awaken Hub that only 2% of start-ups funded by VCs have a female on the founding team. They are trying to break down the barriers. She was delighted to talk about the detailed work done by Awaken Hub to provide right platform and training for female entrepreneurs to take the next step in their start-up journey.

Precision Sports Technology is currently raising the pre seed funds and will be closing this by the end of Feb, 2024. Enterprise Ireland has invested in Precision Sports Technology. The other investors include angel investors, Austrian bank , Slovenian VC to name a few. Emma loves using Linkedin to build her network and utilizes this platform to connect with potential customers as well as investors.

Precision is currently have a team of 8 employees working from Galway and Dublin. So the monthly meetings happen once in Galway and once in Dublin.

The Galway girl plays guitar, loves music and attending concerts is a way for her to unwind from the hustle of start-up life. Precision Sports Technology and Emma have already received numerous awards for the work done so far in the sports tech domain. Emma has an interest take on the awards:- “It is great to get the recognition. However, it is not necessarily progress for your start-ups. Progress is sales and products shipped to market. That is something founders need to be conscious of that you cannot spent lot of your time applying for the awards.”

The Sports Tech global market was valued at around USD 22 Billion in the last fiscal and is expected to touch USD 47 Billion by 2027. There is a detailed article on this by the Irish Independent.

Active lifestyle, sports and action around this is on the rise. Start-ups who are in this space has a huge market available to tap into , provided they get everything right in regard with market, product, pricing, etc.

The early stage start-ups from Ireland in this sports tech domain are definitely worth tracking which includes Precision Sports Tech, Brace, Field of Vision, Rugby Smarts, Move Ahead, etc. Hope to see most of them making a global impact in the next few years.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

You can listen to the podcast where Emma we discussed a lot more including a detailed explanation of the technology used in Precision, the tech meet-ups in Galway, her favourite music band, more details about the team working at Precision, etc.