A little over a year ago, we started taking a more thematic approach to sourcing opportunities in sports data and analytics. We were seeing clear shifts across the industry: ownership becoming more institutional, decisions increasingly driven by data, and player bets carrying higher financial stakes. In this environment, data isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.

As we spoke with teams, advisors, and operators across the sports ecosystem, one name kept surfacing: SkillCorner.

When we first met the company in 2023, SkillCorner was focused primarily on soccer. What stood out immediately was the quality of their computer vision and machine learning, how widely their data was already used by professional teams, and how consistently customers pointed to real impact in recruiting decisions.

In just a year, SkillCorner expanded into basketball and American football and launched new products that existing customers quickly adopted. It became clear they weren’t building a narrow tool, but a technical platform now used by more than 300 organizations worldwide, spanning both professional and collegiate sports.

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‍Why This Matters Now

Across sports, the cost of getting recruitment wrong has risen sharply. Growth in viewership and long-term media rights has brought more capital into teams and leagues, along with greater scrutiny and expectations. What once separated early adopters from the field is now baseline. Teams are moving beyond basic counting stats to deeper, more decision-grade insights.

SkillCorner sits squarely in that decision flow. Their Physical and Game Intelligence products help teams assess more players, with more consistency, by turning movement, positioning, and effort into objective signals teams can trust.

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The Founders

Hugo Bordigoni and Charles Montmaneix met in an entrepreneurship course in 2015. Hugo was an undergraduate, already deeply technical in computer vision and machine learning. Charles brought years of operating experience, most recently in international banking. Their partnership combines technical depth with operational discipline.

One thing became clear as we spent time with them: they execute. The roadmap they described materialized. New products launched. Customers adopted them. The business expanded into new leagues and sports, including the NBA and NFL, while relationships with long-standing partners continued to flourish.

Over time, they’ve built a team that pairs top-tier AI expertise with a strong understanding of how teams actually make decisions. Teams, leagues, and federations around the world consistently pointed to SkillCorner as uniquely able to bridge this gap.

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‍Built as a Platform

For decades, sports data collection relied on manual work: analysts tagging video, tracking events, and annotating plays. SkillCorner rethought that model. They automated player and ball tracking from a single broadcast camera, converting standard game footage into detailed, structured data without the need for specialized and often expensive hardware inside stadiums.

Today, their systems process billions of data points across competitions, capturing how players move, space the floor, defend, and interact over full games and seasons. That scale changes how teams evaluate talent. Instead of relying on clips or isolated moments, teams can assess repeatable behavior across thousands of minutes of play.

SkillCorner’s platform is built to scale across sports, unlock deeper insights, and lower data collection costs over time.

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A Large and Expanding Market

Soccer is global, and SkillCorner already works with many of the world’s top clubs. But one of the more surprising learnings for us was how valuable this data is for smaller teams.

Elite clubs can afford large scouting and analytics staffs. Mid-tier and smaller teams often can’t. For them, access to consistent, objective tracking data can materially change how they recruit and compete over time.

The same pattern is emerging in other sports. In basketball, for example, tracking off-ball movement, spacing, and defensive positioning across full seasons is creating a new layer of information that’s reshaping player evaluation and roster construction.

Similar dynamics are playing out in American football and college sports. Recent changes like the transfer portal and NIL have increased roster turnover, forcing coaching staffs to evaluate thousands of portal entrants in a matter of days.

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Why We Invested

For us, this investment came at a clear inflection point.

Teams are operating under greater pressure, facing complex roster economics, unpredictable player movement, and heightened expectations for performance and accountability. At the same time, advances in computer vision have made automated tracking reliable at scale for the first time.

SkillCorner sits at the intersection of these trends. They’ve proven they can deliver high-quality data across multiple sports, without losing focus on product depth or customer needs.

Talent evaluation will never be driven by data alone. But as competition intensifies and margins tighten, better information matters more. SkillCorner is helping teams make those decisions with greater confidence, and we’re excited to partner with them.