Sport's Cutting Edge

Minimis have combined your smart watch and phone, and put it in your sunglasses, to streamline athletic performance. There’s no more cocking your wrist to check your numbers, or taking your eyes off the road to tap on your phone. Ideal for running and biking, it’s a product created by a finance lawyer and a medical engineer. Joseph Guo is a young lawyer who’s worked at ASIC, IAG and Macquarie. He’...

Tradable Bits run data-backed fan engagement for the Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs, Buffalo Bills, Live Nation, the AFL, and many more. Mike Morris- after a combined 15 years at Southern Cross Austereo and Cricket Australia- is now running APAC.  Mike tells us about Tradable’s pioneering launch of Agentic AI fan solutions for sports teams and leagues.  With 80% of global young fans feeling d...

Pickleball is exploding—and Australia is just getting started. In this episode of Sport’s Cutting Edge , we sit down with National Pickleball League founder Ron Shell to unpack how pickleball is becoming a cultural and commercial force. From his high-powered sports business career in the USA, to building a start-up league from scratch, the 35 year-old Australian shares why pickleball stood out as...

GravityFit create a suite of apparel and products to aid core stability, performance and health, and they are the product of choice for NASA, Aussie Golf Superstar Cam Smith, and plenty of ordinary people all over the world. Kirsty Richardson is carrying on a family legacy, started by her mother-in-law Carolyn Richardson- who was the second ever Aussie to attain a PHD in Physiotherapy. Carolyn pio...

Suzie Betts has just been crowned World Number One sports product start-up, at the ISPO in Munich, Germany. The Melbourne Mum-of-three founded her Boob Protect product in 2018, after sensing a coming crisis- the lack of protection for female athletes, just as female sport was starting to boom. About 60% of Aussie Rules and Rugby League female athletes receive knocks to the breasts. Only 10% of tho...

Dailymotion is a French video-sharing platform, owned by multibillion dollar media conglomerate Canal+. Dailymotion are building out their operations in Australia and Asia, creating cost-efficient ways for teams and athletes to reach new audiences, and drive revenue. Parisian Jean-Baptiste Alary moved to Australia 10 years ago, and is leading his company’s charge- empowering sports to seize the mo...

Virginia Tech has ranked SWAARM’s halo head protection helmet as the number one halo helmet in the world, reducing up to 98% of head collision impact. Virginia Tech are world-leaders in independent, unvarnished helmet ratings. SWAARM are a South Australian start-up making their mark on the global stage, in the most crucial issue facing sport. Gregg Harris from SWAARM joins us to delve into the con...

Sam Robertson is an OG sports scientist- his first big success was the Western Bulldogs’ 2016 Premiership-winning campaign. He’s gone on to work with Barcelona, the San Antonio Spurs, and now with the biggest client of all- FIFA. Robertson and colleague Jessica Zendler have founded the Institute of Sports Tech Standards. In an age of AI, compounding chaos, and unbridled tech growth, the Institute...

Australian sportstech revenue last financial year was $5.65 billion, and this 10% year-on-year growth has seen our sector surge into the Global Top 6. ASTN Chair Martin Schlegel outlines key international and domestic growth components, and shares ever-present pinch points we need to overcome. ASTN Operations Boss Amy Crosland joins us live from Taiwan, as Aussie sportstech becomes a go-to for tec...

The NRL, Queensland Government and ASTN have joined forces to supercharge sportstech innovation. Talk All Sport was front and centre in the NRL’s Sportstech Sprint. Founder Charlie Wilkie tells us how his company provides world leading speech-command scoring, empowering referees and umpires like never before, and alleviating the scoring logistics burden. ASTN Queensland Boss Nikita Vogel takes us...

Padraig O’Donovan started Australia’s first ever digital TV streaming, with Network Ten’s ‘10 Play’. He completed a world first at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, creating specific digital media revenue properties within the streaming platform. Padraig’s 30-year tech career has seen him at the vanguard of innovation, and in 2018 he started his own shop, Streamcake. Streamcake is based on revenue-d...

Naveen Velautham and Kenyan javelin World Champion Julius Yego started Invictus as a way to spread to gospel of sport beyond those with financial or geographic fortune. And the International Olympic Committee have just selected Invictus as one of its top 25 global sportstech start-ups. Yego taught himself how to throw a javelin by watching YouTube- the online scroll took him from novice to world’s...

Everclime is a sustainability activation platform that works with clients to create clear economic and rational structure around their ESG pursuits. Sebastian Gray founded the business in 2022, based on his genuine passion for a sustainable world, and his knowledge that a strong economic case must be built for long-term action to take hold. He previously co-founded the digital media platform, DUGO...

The Global Institute of Sport (GIS) has bases in London, Miami, Dubai, Toronto and Melbourne, and is a great progenitor of our global sports workforce. Sport is now the 9th largest industry in the world, with revenues exceeding $2.65 trillion.   GIS are equipping the next generation to take the industry further than ever before. They offer in-person and online undergraduate and postgraduate degree...

The greatest sports team of all time is the US Olympic Team, and Team USA has been epically dominant in the pool. In the land of NASA, the Pentagon, and an America-first mentality, one of the biggest revelations of the Paris Olympics was that Team USA would hire an Australian business to run the sports performance tech in the pool. Iggy Jovanovic’s Gerford AI powered the Americans to another supre...

Esports is a multi-billion-dollar industry that continues its rate of knots growth every year. Sam Ward sees esport as a pathway to equality in sport, where people with neurodivergence, special needs, physical disability, along with people from all backgrounds, can play together as one. Valor Esports is the ultimate training platform for esports- it’s like going to fun school, for both gamers, nov...

Forbes magazine crowned Victoria Zorin as one of Asia’s top 30 business people under 30 in 2023. Victoria created Nola, a crowd analytics platform to amplify and ease the experiences of attendees at sporting events, music festivals, shopping centres and other large spaces. With A.I, Nola is able to capture real-time information during events to allow venues to make decisions to ease the burden of...

Maria Baker founded Nobody’s Princess to make snow and ski gear specific for girls and women. Maria came up against the chronic issue of women being paid scant regard in sports apparel, with the “pink it, and shrink it” mentality falling well short of the mark. She wants women of all shapes and sizes to feel completely at home in her gear, and to encourage people to head to the slopes, who may nev...

The recent inclusion of risk management into sports and recreation clubs can be challenging for organisations to manage. Founder of Safeguarding You, Adam Wood, created a platform where what once was daunting, is now made much easier. The program provides users with a simple assessment to understand their risks, then actionable advice is delivered to lower the risk percentage. Wood has been heavil...

Ryan Talbot has spent the past two decades as one of Australia’s leading figures in IT security, working with our biggest bank- the Commonwealth, and our biggest state- New South Wales. Ryan is the one who first introduced biometric security for the Commonwealth Bank, and was a gun-for-hire with international casinos to protect their security systems. He’s also an athletics coach, and that experie...

Emma Thomson worked for two decades as a medical scientist, and in that time, also became a ‘Cricket Mum’. That latter title led Emma to become a sportstech entrepreneur. After endless afternoons bowling balls at her young son for batting practice, Emma realised there was a gap in the market. Bowling machines are commonplace for adult cricketers, and so Emma tailor-made a bowling machine to suit k...

Andrew Lemon has spent the past 15 years working on the front line of healthcare as an osteopath, he is also a business and tech entrepreneur.  Eight years ago he co-founded Strength by Numbers, to finally fill a gap in the market he had been combatting for years, namely, the lack of specific strength measurements in healthcare. Heart rate, blood pressure, weight, BMI are all measured as a matter...

Lining up for food, drinks and merchandise at events can cause the spectator to miss out on the action, spending time standing in a queue rather than enjoying the experience. Tech entrepreneur David Jakic and e-business specialist Norbert Herrmann have created Liively- technology that allows the user to scan a QR code and order straight from their phone, and have their order brought directly to th...

WSC Sport is the world-leading AI-generated short form sports video creator. They create the video content distributed by the NBA, LaLiga, NASCAR, and the AFL, NRL & Cricket Australia. Guy Port is WSC’s Asia Pacific Boss, and he describes the company's development of sports technology, and how it will continue to innovate new ways for the viewer to enjoy a personalised entertainment experi...

Craig O’Shannessy is the architect of the Italian Renaissance of tennis- with Jannik Sinner’s AO 2024 win the first of many. Before leading Team Italy climb back up the mountain, O’Shannessy was head-hunted by the most successful player of all time, Novak Djokovic in 2017. O’Shannesy worked with Novak when during the most contested time in tennis history, with Federer, Nadal and Djokovic competing...