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Since its foundation in July 2021, the Austrian start-up zone14 has established itself as a specialist in soccer video analysis. With its innovative approach and the clear goal of providing soccer clubs of all sizes with access to state-of-the-art technology, the company is growing continuously. With the completion of another investment round and the FFG Basic Program funding, zone14 is starting the next season full of energy.
After narrowly missing out on an investment during its appearance on the start-up show "2 Minuten 2 Millionen", the Viennese technology company zone14 has now announced a six-figure investment. The circle of investors around Tim Moser (TM Group), Philipp Omenitsch and Wolfgang Reisinger (Tractive) is expanding to include well-known names. Runtastic founders Alfred Luger and Christian Kaar, business angel Silke Greiner from A&S Beteiligungsgesellschaft and BE-terna founder Christian Kranebitter bring a wealth of experience and a great deal of passion for soccer to the table. The company also receives funding from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency's (FFG) basic program to further research and develop the unique algorithms in the field of player tracking and sports data collection.
Alfred Luger, co-founder of Runtastic and investor, comments: "We are impressed by the passion and technological know-how of the zone14 team. Their innovations are exactly what the fast-growing sports technology market, especially in soccer, needs right now. They offer a solution that is not only technically advanced, but also creates real added value for soccer."
More than 65 soccer clubs in five countries are already working with zone14. The main focus is on the automatic recording, analysis and live streaming of matches. zone14 REPLAY platform now has over 500 monthly active users with a strong upward trend. It is precisely this user feedback that prompted the FFG to support experimental research into even more extensive data collection in soccer.
"Thanks to zone14 STATS every coach get access to running and position data based purely on the recorded video images. Our algorithms are robust enough to generate data even outside the perfect laboratory conditions of professional soccer stadiums" ,says Lukas Grömer, founder and head of AI and product at zone14. In addition to saving on expensive hardware trackers, events such as shots, passes etc. will also be recorded fully automatically for each player in the future thanks to the FFG funding. According to founder Simon Schmiderer, this would completely turn the entire sports data collection process on its head: "Currently, this data is still collected manually by tens of thousands of employees, mostly in low-wage countries.“
You can find an article and an interview from Dejan Jovicevic, the CEO and founder of Brutkasten, on all current topics and much more below.