Pullela Gopichand turns co-founder of Hyderabad-based sports starup
Hyderabad: Former Indian badminton player and current Chief National Coach of the India National Badminton team Pullela Gopichand is now donning a new hat – that of a co-founder of Hyderabad-based Matchday.ai, which developed a sport analytics platform using artificial intelligence. The platform gives insights into shot accuracies, rate attacks and defense, court coverage, winners […]
Hyderabad: Former Indian badminton player and current Chief National Coach of the India National Badminton team Pullela Gopichand is now donning a new hat – that of a co-founder of Hyderabad-based Matchday.ai, which developed a sport analytics platform using artificial intelligence.
The platform gives insights into shot accuracies, rate attacks and defense, court coverage, winners and errors, rally length, and also tells whether it is a forehand, a backhand or an overhead shot among others.
“As somebody who has gone through the entire cycle being a player, being a coach and having seen the evolution of players and also of the sport over time, I think sport, especially badminton, needs something where the players can have a direct connection with the data. More than ever before, today’s youngsters read the data much more,” Gopi, who is now taking care of growth, channel partnerships and new product development at the company, told Telangana Today.
“I think that for the longest period of time, a lot of things were being done manually. The intelligence was there to capture but it needed manual interventions to do the analysis. Matchday.ai is one of the first tools that has artificial intelligence built into it to do the analysis. The effort is to make sport analysis, which earlier was available only at the professional level, accessible at various levels and various places. This is useful for players and can make a huge impact on the sport,” he said.
According to Gopi, the analytics segment is exciting and the space is growing. “I am looking at analytics as an enhancement to what I am doing. Today, Hyderabad is seen as the badminton capital in some sense. It is only right that something that is a product of the future is developed here. I am convinced that this is the next big step for the development of the sport. We are on the cusp of producing an innovation that can disrupt badminton and also sports globally,” he said about the made-in-Hyderabad technology product. Harsha Vardhan Kommana and Ganesh Yaprala are the other co-founders of Matchday.ai that took shape in 2019.
More than 200 players have already used this product. The company rolled out the beta version during the Olympics and subsequently rolled out the analytics for most of the international tournaments thereafter. Badminton federations and coaches of Germany, Finland, Denmark and the UK have shown interest in it. It was rolled out in India for the first time in the recently concluded BAI Senior Badminton Tournament in Hyderabad.
“We want to test the product for semi-professional and amateur segments and make necessary changes before rolling out on a large scale. In the next three months, we will install our cameras in ten select academies or schools in India and five academies across Europe. The plan is to roll out to at least 100 academies in India in one year and scale to other sports thereafter,” said Gopi.
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