Why we invested in ReSpo.Vision

Published in

RKKVC

7 min readMay 25, 2021

When we launched RKKVC, we set our ambitious goal to focus on two targets— search & invest in the radically new technologies that can disrupt markets and, at the same time, bring value to society. Many funds say such things, but we take it seriously. Since the beginning, we have received literally hundreds of pitch decks and it is difficult to find companies that would meet our expectations both in the context of implementing game changing technologies and phenomenal founders. Here is a quick explanation of why we bet on ReSpo.Vision and believe that they are just such a company.

We all know that time and money are the most precious assets for soccer clubs but also the bookmakers. There are hundreds of blog posts on what a “next-gen” sports analytics actually is, on the essence of the Artificial Intelligence revolution which is bound to a fundamental transformation of industry value chains on a global scale. Undoubtedly there is a trend of growing demand for data analysis in the sports industry. This is why we were searching best in a class team of AI scientists and business executives in that field.

Before the investment, we were observing ReSpo.Vision for about half a year. We saw the company grow, acquire new customers, experiment and adjust during the bootstrap phase. (i.e., spend their own money). That shows the dedication to the project and proved, the team can operate very efficiently. It sounds easy but imagine quitting a great and perspective job and spending several hundred thousand zlotych in the very brave idea.

An extraordinary team with a new, unique idea that tackles real problems persuaded us to invest.

What: investment

ReSpo.Vision is a young company, but we had our sights on them for some time. The founding team consists of former business consultants, professionals in the field of AI and great, award-winning programmers. The company was a part of the best sportstech accelerator in the world — Hype and has as its first client a top-tier football club: Paris Saint Germain.

The company offers a SaaS, AI-based football analytics platform for clubs and bookmakers. In other words, R.V algorithms can capture, track and analyze in the real life the 3D data of all players (and ball), based on any TV broadcast feed. The company started their expertise in football, but they aim to replicate the technology also for another sports segments.

It needs to be highlighted, that fully automated tracking solutions for soccer and bookmakers already exist on the market. Some of them are already large and advanced, but the majority still lagging apart.

What distinguishes ReSpo.Vision is that the company entered the market with a disruption — it can analyze, identify and track the players in 3D based only on the live TV feed. No humans, nor pre-installed cameras are required. Thanks to that, the company can analyze the historic matches and train the algorithms on the much larger data sets. On contrary, every competitor must possess a camera on the field (from one up to six) to receive an acceptable image quality and accurate analysis.

This high-end accuracy allows the company to introduce a new, unique value for soccer clubs and gives insights on player finesses for the teams as well as broadcast the live data for the bookmakers.

Why: people

The team was one of many compelling factors. There is no doubt founders are the perfect mix of business and tech knowledge, whereas some of them are top-tier data scientists (Kaggle Masters with multiple awards, AI/Computer Vision PhDs, Statisticians and mathematicians).

• Backed up by years of experience in business consulting and entrepreneurship at AI and ML centers of Mateusz and Paweł. The team have a clear understanding of particular pain points in the sports shopfloor. They both have a laser focus on their solution and company. This is why they have formed a highly capable team.

• Wojciech and Łukasz, a duo of technological gurus. Co-founders witch skills are one of the highest in the world. Multiple award winners, machine learning and data scientists’ experts that connect what is a “science” with engineering, bringing new possibilities to the ReSpo.Vision.

Why: technology

It would be difficult to explain in justa few sentences how ReSpo.Vision performs “time dilatation” with their tech solutions. In simple words, the technology can capture the data from any, single camera and harvest 25 players’ body points, 60 times per second. The solution is based on three pillars, based on live TV feed or any past game recordings:

- Data acquisition: extracting the data of unmatched detail and resolution using computer vision.

- Data contextualization: data extraction, contextualization and predictions are done automatically using unsupervised learning.

- Predictions: the system can process hundreds of matches at the same time, giving precise suggestions using machine learning.

It needs to be highlighted, that extracting 3D data from every frame of a 2D video with high accuracy, details, and resolution is a difficult task. It is a quantum leap for analytics, which is currently based on discrete logs of game events in 2D. All the stages of the data acquirement process are done automatically, without human intervention.

Paweł Osterreicher is leading the company with a vision to be globally available, without any scalability issues. This is why the system deployment and scaling will be done via cloud instances. This ensures high uptime, reliability, security and easy scaling with load balancing. The company aims for system modularity and minimal dependencies between modules for deployment. The module is designed to be stateless, which allows scaling flexibility and cost minimization. The number of workers and instances used are managed by an orchestration software (Kubernetes) that allows easy scaling, depending on the number of contents needed to be processed. Deployment requires a combination of CPU and GPU resources, both of which are widely available via cloud providers, that is why the company is partnered with best-in-class providers: NVIDIA Inception Program, Oracle and AWS LaunchPad.

Use cases:

Bookmakers — ReSpo.Vision provides automate 3D data capture from any TV feed — using an AI computer vision to get the 3D position of every player’s body parts’ every 1/60 sec. Based on that, bookmakers can add widgets for game visualization & stats increasing user engagement. In that case, the customer can see the live match from the aerial view and receive suggestions. Also, it increases betting hints accuracy that is based on statistics.

Media & TV — the company can work on native transmission content and provide the statistics, probabilities and analytics within the milliseconds; which improves user experience

Football clubs & federations — ReSpo structures a database by putting raw data into context — using the algorithms coded with football knowledge auto-tag events. Thanks to that, clubs can use so-what database analysis. By using a predictive AI turns large datasets into a user-friendly tactical, scouting and predictive platform.

Why: market

The total addressable market of sports analytics will reach more than EUR 1.3 billion in 2025 (around 2020–2025 40% CAGR!) and the sports betting market is predicted to reach EUR 91 bln (2020–2025 CAGR 11%). During our analysis, we have noticed that most of the major leagues like NBA, MLB, NFL have already undergone the data analytics revolution

What is interesting, Europe is the best region for football tech investments, whereas London accounts for 22% of football tech investment globally. Additionally, there was a growing interest in sports analytics from VC, PE and acquisition-wise interests, so we bet, that the trend, that ReSpo.Vision will benefit of, is about to start.

The co-investor

We like co-investments. It is important to share knowledge, network and experiences with other big brands and great minds. This is why, whenever we are committed to investing, we also bring other investors to share the cake.

ReSpo.Vision attracted our friends, and we completed the pre-seed round with ffVC — it is a leading NYC-based venture capital firm that has demonstrated success scaling global tech business. ffVC Warsaw is fully staffed with two of the firm’s five partners and works in conjunction with the rest of the ffVC network to bring to Poland everything that ffVC has done over the past twelve years in the US.

Hints for the future founders

We have invested in ReSpo.Vision during the peak of the pandemic of Covid-19 in 2021, whereas there was a lot of uncertainty. That affected investment processes, some of them were very delayed. To sustain the momentum and take key hires, the company decided to invite business angels to invest in the form of convertible notes. That small amount gave the company oxygen and none of the investment parties were under time pressure.

It is a good example of that it is always worth having some BAs around your startup to perform such emergency bridge loans, so the business development will not slow down and the company will keep the key hires.

You can read more about ReSpo.Vision here:

Why we invested in ReSpo.Vision

What: investment

Why: people

Why: technology

Why: market

Written by Mateusz Bodio