With crowdfunding raising over $2.5 billion in capital across Europe in 2014, its wide appeal and use among fledgling technology companies to raise more capital seemed well founded going into 2015. However, for Precision Sports Technologies, the creator of Precision Wear, a wearable monitoring system for individual athletes and teams, the decision to launch a Kickstarter campaign in December of 2015, didn’t work out, raising just $2,800 against a goal of over $50,000.
“The Kickstarter Launch was a tough and hard learning experience for us,” wrote Alexander Oviawe, the founder and CEO of Precision Sports Technologies. “What we learnt is that with crowdfunding, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors behind it all. All the best and most successful campaigns in most cases had investment beforehand and spent a lot of money going through a proper marketing campaign for 4-6 months before launch. Of course this isn’t the perception given before going into it.
“But even in its failure we learnt something important; we actually had a great conversion rate. Those who knew or visited the campaign made orders. What became very clear is that only about 3,000 (people) in the whole world knew of our campaign, and that was never going to be enough. For that, we needed a proper campaign, and for that, we needed money.”
Despite this significant setback, the company is still up and running and made the decision in September to look for additional investment, which it has now secured from Boundary Capital, a venture capital company.
Thanks to this new infusion of capital, Oviawe outlined that Precision, despite its previous experience using Kickstarter, is “aiming to use crowdfunding to launch our consumer product later in the year.”
The product is a wearable that uses sensor and motion technology to measure an athlete, or team’s motion, action, stress and load during sporting activities. This, the company argues, enables an athlete or team to know “what, how and where the body is stressed and how the body responds to that stress.”
It is combined with an app, available on iOS and Windows Phone, which enables users to record training sessions and allows for training analysis of the sessions, indicating effects on the body and what parts, injury probability risks, training recommendations to help adapt training behavior and reduce injury risk.
Underpinning this entire product is PrecisionNET, an analytics technology which the company calls a “virtual sports science service,” which also provides predictive training recommendations to reduce the chances of injuries.
“We have a tendency to pick the hard road over here at Precision Sports,” Oviawe said of the choice to take investment. “Unlike most startups these days, we didn’t jump straight to seeking investment, which seems to be the trend. Instead we wanted to avoid seeking investment and bootstrap for as long as possible. When we finally decided to speak to investors, it was important that we found the right ones.”
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Boundary Capital will apply its business model to Precision, which is to appoint what it calls “experienced, experienced, investing directors as Venturers, typically acting as executive directors or Chairman and assisting with commercialization as well as helping to de-risk the proposition for investors and entrepreneurs alike.”
Mark Warrilow, an executive and entrepreneur with experience in international product development globally, has thus been appointed as “Venturer” to Precision as part of this investment. Meanwhile, Dr. Richard Leaver, a partner at Boundary Capital, will also be managing this investment.
“I’ve been involved with commercialising sports ventures and technology before, and saw this as a great opportunity to help the team to get a potentially revolutionary product to the right markets,” Warrilow said.
“The sports technology Internet of Things market has been growing quickly for a long time, and to work with such an innovation is very exciting. We’re delighted to invest in a technology which has so much disruptive potential and are delighted to introduce our experienced Venturer with so much experience in this space, to help to productise and take it to market,” Leaver concluded.
With this relaunch, Precision is also now currently running an early access program for clubs to use the technology.
“The investment allowed us to update the our product and make it better and more fitting,” Oviawe said. “We had gone very far bootstrapping for years, something the investors were impressed by. But it became clear we had pushed things to the limits, and capital would allow us to do the things we felt we needed to do.
“Right now we’re working on relaunching the Precision Wear Team System first in a matter of weeks. However, we still have our eye on the ‘prosumer’ market, and plan to launch the consumer version of the Precision Wear later this year via crowdfunding. The difference will be unlike most such products, we would be ready to ship a couple of months after the campaign ends, rather than having people wait months, even a year or two before getting their product.
“We’ve already made significant changes to (PrecisionNET), such as certain backend changes, new addition to the team, such as well-known sports scientist Mladen Jovanovic as our Chief Sports Science Officer and a few others, and even right now we’re going through the process of adding genetic profiling to PrecisionNET via our strategic partner DNActiv8, and many more. We’re planning to do some fun things and provide some tools for PNET that we believe should really push the sports science industry forward.”
Beyond the product updates, another key part of the new funding for Precision was that it “finally brought us into the ‘inner wall’ of the funding kingdom,” according to Oviawe. “We’ve secured a partnership with a known NFL player Marques Colston as our U.S. Business Advisor, and are making some key inroads into the US market. None of that would’ve been achievable without that capital injection.”
The company will focus on what Oviawe terms “locomotor” sports, such as soccer, rugby, hockey, football and marathon running. Oviawe, who was a professional kickboxer before becoming a sports science lecturer and professional coach, is even using early prototypes for a future consumer launch of the product focusing on combat sports such as boxing, kicking boxing and MMA.