Sports have been among some of the most popular and lucrative media plays in the world, luring broadcasters, advertisers and consumers to fork out huge sums to secure the chance to watch (and sponsor) their favorite teams and athletes.
That content, unsurprisingly, also typically costs a ton of money to produce, narrowing the production and distribution funnel even more. But today, a startup that’s cracked open that model with an autonomous, AI -based camera that lets any team record, edit and distribute their games, is announcing a round of funding to build out its business targeting the long tail of sporting teams and fixtures. Veo Technologies, a Copenhagen startup that has designed a video camera and cloud-based subscription service to record and then automatically pick out highlights of games, which it then hosts on a platform for its customers to access and share that video content, has picked up €20 million (around $24.5 million) in a Series B round of funding. The funding is being led by Danish investor Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, with participation from US-based Courtside VC, France’s Ventech and Denmark’s SEED Capital. Veo’s CEO and co-founder Henrik Teisbæk said in an interview that the startup is not disclosing its valuation, but a source close to funding tells me that it’s well over $100 million. Teisbæk said that the plan will be to use to the funds to continue expanding the company’s business on two levels. First, Veo will be digging into expanding its US operations, with an office in Miami. Second, it plans to continue enhancing the scope of its technology: The company started out optimising its computer vision software to record and track the matches for the most popular team sport in the world, football (soccer to US readers), with customers buying the cameras — which retail for $800 — and the corresponding (mandatory) subscriptions — $1,200 annually — both to record games for spectators, as well as to use the footage for all kinds of practical purposes like training and recruitment videos. The key is that the cameras can be set up and left to run on their own. Once they are in place, they can record using wide-angles the majority of a soccer field (or whatever playing space is being used) and then zoom and edit down based on that. Now, Veo is building the computer vision algorithms to expand that proposition into a plethora of other team-based sports including rugby, basketball and hockey, and it is ramping up the kinds of analytics that it can provide around the clips that it generates as well as the wider match itself. Even with the slowdown in a lot of sporting activity this year due to Covid — in the UK for example, we’re in a lockdown again where team sports below professional leagues, excepting teams for disabled people, have been prohibited — Veo has seen a lot of growth. The startup currently works with some 5,000 clubs globally ranging from professional sports teams through to amateur clubs for children, and it has recorded and tracked 200,000 games since opening for business in 2018, with a large proportion of that volume in the last year and in the US. For a point of reference, in 2019, when we covered a $6 million round for Veo, the startup had racked up 1,000 clubs and 25,000 games, pointing to customer growth of 400% in that period. The Covid-19 pandemic has indeed altered the playing field — literally and figuratively — for sports in the past year. Spectators, athletes, and supporting staff need to be just as mindful as anyone else when it comes to spreading the coronavirus. That’s not just led to a change in how many games are being played, but also for attendance: witness the huge lengths that the NBA went to last year to create an extensive isolation bubble in Orlando, Florida, to play out the season, with no actual fans in physical seats watching games, but all games and fans virtually streamed into the events as they happened. That NBA effort, needless to say, came at a huge financial cost, one that any lesser league would never be able to carry, and so that predicament has led to an interesting use case for Veo. Pre-pandemic, the Danish startup was quietly building its business around catering to the long tail of sporting organizations who — even in the best of times — would be hard pressed to find the funds to buy cameras and/or hire videographers to record games, not just an essential part of how people can enjoy a sporting event, but useful for helping with team development. “There is a perception that football is already being recorded and broadcast, but in the UK (for example) it’s only the Premier League,” Teisbæk said. “If you go down one or two steps from that, nothing is being recorded.” Before Veo, to record a football game, he added, “you need a guy sitting on a scaffold, and time and money to then cut that down to highlights. It’s just too cumbersome. But video is the best tool there is to develop talent. Kids are visual learners. And it’s a great way to get recruited sending videos to colleges.” Those use cases then expanded with the pandemic, he said. “Under cornavirus rules, parents cannot go out and watch their kids, and so video becomes a tool to follow those matches.”