Sports tech firm Game Theory has acquired Matchday.ai (Matchday), a leading sports analytics startup, for an undisclosed amount. Game Theory is backed by Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath’s Rainmatter fund.
The acquisition, effective as of October 28, 2023, would help Game Theory strengthen its commitment to innovation in the sports gaming sector by bringing in technology to casual real sports. The aim is to accelerate the technology roadmap of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and computer vision and improve the real sports experience for their users.
“Matchday has developed incredible computer vision technology,” said Game Theory’s founder, Sudeep Kulkarni. “The world’s top athletes have used it to help improve their game. Game Theory will now bring this technology to everyday players.”
Game Theory was founded to provide highly engaging and competitive real sports experiences to everyday users. With the acquisition of Matchday.ai, Game Theory aims to set itself apart as one of the very few companies in the world with capabilities to bring deep tech capabilities into the world of sports to take the gameplay experience to sports enthusiasts of all skill levels.
“The sheer number of data points from actual gameplay that will now feed into this tech will be game-changing,” said Kulkarni. “This will also help us be able to deliver tech-enabled coaching, which was so far only for pro-sports. We can now not just identify micro improvements for casual real sports players but also function as a tech-first scout for building India’s future athletes.”
The driving force behind this acquisition was Matchday.ai’s highly validated tech stack, which employs computer vision and AI capabilities, already being used in pro-sports. This technology stack significantly shortens Game Theory’s time to market and brings in the key talent that built it from the ground up.
“From our initial engagement with the Game Theory team, it was striking how harmoniously our visions aligned, in wanting to make sports more engaging through the use of technology,” said co-founders of Matchday.ai, Ganesh Yaparla and Harsha Vardhan Komanna, about the acquisition. “We were all able to agree that working together gave us the best chance of realizing our shared vision.”
With Game Theory’s user base over time, this technology will be able to access millions of games and billions of data points every month to rapidly refine the algorithms and become more versatile with each passing day.
This marks Game Theory’s first acquisition. Experts said that technologies like computer vision have been mostly available to professional athletes and often at a high cost, making it inaccessible. This acquisition will make intelligent analytics accessible to the casual real sporting community.
“This acquisition has immense significance in the largely untapped opportunity of using the current state of technology in real sports,” said Rakesh Bordia, partner at Prequate Advisory, the exclusive M&A advisor on the acquisition.