Sports tech startups poised to launch next Korean unicorn

UK Premier League Tottenham Hotspur star forward Son Heung-min and two-way US MLB icon Shohei Ohtani, a designated pitcher and hitter for the Los Angeles Angels, have something in common -- both wear state-of-the-art technology.

But they are not alone as more professional and amateur sports teams and players are relying on high-tech gadgets to boost their performance, manage athletes’ health and recovery and engage with sports fans.

As digitalization is rapidly transforming the sports industry, South Korean sports tech startups are actively joining a global race to build new and innovative technologies to revolutionize the sports scene.

According to global intelligence and market research firm Markets and Markets, the global sports tech market is forecast to nearly double to $41.8 billion in 2027 from $21.9 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate of 13.8%.

Amid growing interest in the sports tech market, a number of Korean sports tech startups are in the limelight, succeeding in drawing investments from venture capitalists.

KOREAN SPORTS TECH STARTUPS IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Bepro Company, a developer of sports analysis tools, has attracted 22 billion won ($16.6 million) in cumulative investment from major venture capitalists, including Altos Ventures Management Inc., LB Investment Inc. and SoftBank Ventures Asia.

It has signed contracts with 2,300 football teams around the world including those from the K League, the UK Premier League and the German Bundesliga to provide its analytics tool that enables coaches to make real-time game strategies based on live data feeds from athletes on the field.

Riduck Inc., a cycling data analytics program developer, also received seed funding from Korea Investment Accelerator under Korea Investment Holdings Co.

QMIT Co., the developer of B2B SaaS-based team and athletes management platform Plco, pooled investments from Schmidt, an investment accelerator under DSC Investment, as well as Bokwang Investment Corp. and Big Basin Capital.

More Korean sports tech startups are embracing the market set to take off on the rapid advancement of related technologies, ranging from cloud computing for data analysis to artificial intelligence-backed machine learning, to sensors, to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).

The growing interest in personal well-being and leisure time has also led sports tech companies to come up with various sports-related platforms for non-professional athletes and sports fans.

DATA ANALYTICS FOR PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT

The technology at the center of the sports tech market is that targeted to analyze data of games and players to improve a team’s or athletes’ performance, like QMIT’s Plco, which aggregates and analyzes data on each soccer player’s level of fatigue, stress, sleep time and patterns to help coaches come up with customized training strategies for different players.

SSTC provides professional baseball teams in Korea with a 3D motion capture technology-backed training program to help batters improve their swing.

For golfers, Moais Inc. has developed Golf Fix to help golf players fix their swing errors with swing data collected and analyzed by AI technology.

Salted Ltd., a spin-off of Samsung Electronics Co.’s in-house startup incubator program C-Lab, is known for its smart insole fitted with sensors designed to improve golfers' or runners’ posture with collected body weight and moving data.

GAME, STADIUM AND FAN SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Sports tech companies also are armed with a slew of innovative ideas to improve sports venue management and fan engagement.

Pixelscope Co. offers AI-supported automated live broadcasting production for sports events and real-time game statistics from an analysis of games and players that are later turned into graphics.

Korean professional baseball team Lotte Giants and a local startup are working together to determine the most reasonable stadium ticket pricing, using the startup’s machine learning technology. 

Kimcaddie, an app to enable users to make golf lesson bookings, is popular among Korean golfers with downloads of the app already topping 700,000.

Amid growing interest in sports technologies, the Korean government is also expanding its support for startups in the sector.

Korea Venture Investment Corp. under Korea’s Ministry of SMEs and Startups, plans to invest 17.5 billion won in sports tech funding this year.

Write to Jong-Woo Kim at jongwoo@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.