New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 300 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series.
Company name: Kick.AI
Founder(s): Jan-Eric Wargelin, Juho Ranta, Tommi Perälä, Juho Hautala, Otso Lindfors, Lauri Kainulainen
Headquarters: Helsinki
Website: https://www.kickai.com/
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Kick.AI is all about bringing better knowledge into Martial Arts with wearables and data. Gamified training simulations, instant feedback, and tracking your progress will make you train smarter, and become a better Martial Artist as you grow stronger and faster.2. Problem & Solution
Martial Arts is being left behind on the gold rush of wearables into fitness and sports. As long time Taekwondo participants, we identified this problem, as one of our founders was starting to prepare for his 1st DAN test. As you progress, you get better, but eventually the small nuances on your development come more and more hard to detect. Am I getting better? Are all the countless hours at the Dojo / Dojang worth it, am I doing the right things? Am I putting in enough work, or should I invest more of my precious time to get results and how do I measure the development?
As it turned out, there was no consumer martial arts wearable in the market and a team was quickly assembled to tackle this problem. This team consists of highly experienced and talented people from business, service design, tech, sports and product design.
Our solution is to create undeniable value for our user in the form of an app and the world’s first consumer wearable for Martial Arts Kick. Our software gathers data from your training sessions and gives you valuable knowledge as easy to follow dashboards on your smart phone. We identify your strengths and weaknesses and our smart solution learns from your individual data. You will push yourself harder in every session when you use Kick.AI, resulting in faster development and smarter training.
Coaches also need better tools, so we got that covered. Our coaching solution will have multiple athletes provide insights and a connectivity to other eco-systems, as we have identified the needs of the coaches being extensive, covering things like nutrition and sleep, to name a few.
Our software is designed to bring value from the casual practitioner to the elite athletes who compete on the Olympic level.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
We are starting with Taekwondo, which is the biggest Martial Art in the world. TKD has some 80 million practitioners around the globe, making it the 4th biggest in any sport. With branching out to Karate, we are looking at 50 million more practitioners to the market potential.In total there are hundreds of millions of Martial Artists in the world, with the same essential problem: they are not getting meaningful feedback on their training and we are here to solve that.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Our first source of income will be through the sales of the hardware. We have just soft launched the pre-sale of our wearable and based on the pre-sales with minimal marketing effort, we are confident that we will reach our goals on selling out the first batch during pre-sale period. We will also make money with in-app purchases and monthly fees with the high level / coaching solutions.5. Management Team – with titles
Jan-Eric Wargelin - President, CEO, Service DesignTommi Perälä - VP, Business Development
Juho Ranta - Community management, Sports expert
Juho Hautala - Senior Developer
Otso Lindfors, CDO
Lauri Kainulainen, CTO