New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series will be to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story. Feel free to contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for this series.
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Company: Notch Interfaces Inc.
CEO: Stepan Boltalin
Headquarters: New York
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Notch is a wearable sensor network that reconstructs 3D avatars of users and analyzes their movement right on the smartphone screen. The “Powered by Notch” platform allows companies and developers to deploy motion analysis products and save tremendously on R&D and development. Two “powered by Notch” products for golf and baseball are hitting the shelves in a few months (Summer 2016).
2. Problem & Solution
Proper movement technique is crucial for effective and safe performance in sports. 3D movement data is crucial for bringing movements into 3D environments. Recording movement via 2D cameras for detailed analysis is difficult due to line of sight restrictions and noise from non-controlled environments. Non-optical mobile motion capture addresses all these problems. Notch makes motion capture accessible to both general public and product designers/ businesses as a hardware + software motion capture platform.
The hardware part is the set of wearable sensors (accelerometer + gyroscope + compass) that works as a motion collecting sensor network. Sensors are placed via straps and clothing to body parts that need to be tracked. The software components are algorithms that map sensor data to movements of 3D human model and smartphone applications to control sensors and review movements in 3D right environment upon capture. Developers use the Notch SDK to create applications built on top of Notch technology. Product partners take advantage of our manufacturing and supply chain to deploy “powered by Notch” products to mass market.
Notch is scalable and anywhere between 2 and 18 sensors can be used. It is also waterproof and allows anyone do underwater motion-capture.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Overall market size for Notch is close to 10 billion USD in 2016 (e.g. recent Gartner: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3198018 places overall market size of non-smartwatch wearables at $17.2B). On a product level affordable motion capture competes with fitness trackers, smart garments that collect ambiguous data (muscle activation, breathing patterns) and traditional RGB (video) cameras that are used for evaluating motions. In both cases motion capture technology offers movement data that is easy to interpret and is immediately human-readable without line of sight or image resolution limitations. Target market for Notch is over 4 billion dollars, based on the analysis of consumer spending in key verticals.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
Notch Interfaces manufactures and sells motion capture units both in low and high-volume. We also have partnership agreements for non-hardware items with various companies developing our products.
5. Management Team – with titles
Founders: Stepan Boltalin (CEO)
Eszter Ozsvald (CTO).
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
Here is a special discount for Sporttechie readers: http://wearnotch.com/preorder_form?ref=e8757e7b02
Bonus question:
If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?
Hard choice between Kevin Plank (UnderArmour) and Nick Woodman (GoPro) because we admire their companies and paths to success.