Red River Insights - Sports Tech top 10
European sports tech is accelerating!
Dear friends,
Today, as discussions around AI suggest we’re nearing an era where automation could free us from traditional work, we’re invited to collectively explore what it truly means to be human. In this technological renaissance, sports naturally emerge as a powerful way to reconnect with community, resilience, and the fundamental joy of feeling alive.
Just look at the extraordinary running trend sweeping the globe: with an estimated 600 million worldwide, participation is exploding. The recent Paris marathon hosted an astounding 56,000 participants, and running club memberships surged by over 60% in 2024 alone! Something remarkable is indeed happening in sports, and this explosive growth brings a wave of exciting innovation we're thrilled to explore.
At the heart of this transformation lies "Sports Tech," a vast and fascinating landscape encompassing far more than elite athletes and sophisticated gadgets. Sports Tech reaches everyone from professional competitors to enthusiastic amateurs and passionate fans. It spans advanced AI-driven analytics, personalised nutrition tech, immersive fan experiences, and countless other innovations reshaping how we experience sports at every level. At Red River West, our top three sports are running, tennis, and squash, but more generally, we're obsessed with uncovering what's next and identifying the technologies that promise to revolutionise the industry.
Our approach deliberately excludes esports (and the intriguing yet controversial domain of "enhanced games"!) Instead, we're firmly rooted in physical sports, focusing on technologies that enhance performance, amplify fan engagement, and foster healthier, more active communities.
Join us as we journey through this dynamic intersection of sports, technology, and human potential, exploring innovations that aren't just changing how we play, but also how we live, connect, and thrive. This is our second edition focusing on sports, our first was back in 2022. Time flies, and so do trends, as this year's top 10 features entirely new companies compared to our inaugural ranking.
On our side, we’ve got an exciting new investment announcement, scroll down to learn more!
RAMP's Sport Tech top10
We hope this sparks interesting conversations. If you have any comments or would like to suggest a startup that should be included, feel free to reach out to us. Joseph, Chloé and Olivier will be delighted to discuss these trends and rankings.
(Ranking established on 15/4/2025)
The past year has proved that European sports tech is sprinting, not jogging. Our latest RAMP scan crowns Runna as the hottest startup in the region- an assessment spectacularly validated when Strava snapped it up while we were finalising this edition! We have left Runna at #1 because the acquisition is the ultimate real‑world proof that our momentum score spots heat before the headlines land. This acquisition underscores Strava’s commitment to personalised and AI-driven training, significantly expanding its offerings and global reach in running-focused fitness technology.
Beyond that headline, five deep currents are reshaping how Europe trains, fuels, socialises and monetises sport, and they all surface in this month’s Top 10.
The Endurance Wave Rolls In
The podium is a master‑class in running economics. Strava’s Runna buy fills its long‑standing training‑guidance gap and signals consolidation in the runner’s tech stack. Finishers, fresh from a €3.3 M raise, has built France’s largest race‑discovery marketplace just as the Paris Marathon sold 56 000 bibs (at €150 a bib!). Maurten supplies more than half of World‑Marathon‑Major podium finishers with its patented hydrogel, turning nutrition IP into competitive edge. Together they show that distance sport with big audiences, high willingness‑to‑pay, repeat engagement, remains Europe’s sharpest spear‑point.
AI Turns Data into Coaching
Athletes now expect laboratory‑grade feedback every session. Runna’s adaptive plans learn from thousands of user race outcomes; Danu’s 15‑sensor smart socks put force‑plate analytics inside footwear after a €3.5 M Series A. SkillCorner ingests single‑camera football broadcasts and delivers x‑y tracking for 200+ pro clubs, proof that computer vision can replace stadium‑installed antenna arrays Powering Smarter Decisions In Sport.
Behind such tools is an expanding pie: the global sports‑analytics market should grow from ≈US $5 B in 2025 to US $24 B by 2032 on 22–27 % CAGR (Fortune Business Insights).
Sport Replaces Nightclubs
Strava’s 2024 Year‑in‑Sport report reveals a 59% surge in run-club memberships, with 58% of athletes reporting new friendships formed through group workouts. This underscores a broader trend: sports are becoming the new social hubs.
Rolla, with its €6.3M seed funding, the largest in Bosnia’s tech history, is capitalising on this by creating a gamified platform that merges outdoor tracking, virtual quests, and corporate wellness initiatives. Meanwhile, France-based Anybuddy is revolutionising access to racket sports. The platform allows users to book courts for tennis, padel, badminton, and squash without the need for club memberships. Their recent €2M funding round aims to accelerate their expansion, particularly in the rapidly growing padel sector (Padel itself is experiencing explosive growth, as of 2024, there are over 30 million players worldwide, with Europe accounting for 59% of this number.)
This convergence of technology, accessibility, and social engagement is redefining how we approach sports and community. Platforms like Anybuddy are at the forefront, transforming solitary activities into shared experiences, and turning casual players into active community members.
Media Infrastructure Gets Automated
Content is the new ticketing, and teams are drowning in terabytes. ScorePlay closed a US $13M Series A to auto‑tag, route, and monetise assets for 200+ clubs and leagues. The platform’s AI-driven tools enable instant multilingual distribution and real-time delivery to athletes, broadcasters, and sponsors, helping organisations maximise their media value and reach audiences faster than ever before (ScorePlay)
Hardware That Hits Back
Lisbon‑based BHOUT embeds computer‑vision AI into its connected boxing bag, turning solo workouts into motion‑tracked games (bhout). The product hints at a future where hardware, game engines and biometric feedback merge into dopamine‑rich “entertrainment”. Similarly, Danu ,that we mentioned above, offers a wearable system that bridges the gap between laboratory and real-world movement analysis in sports and medicine, providing coaches and athletes with scientifically validated gait analysis and performance insights through smart socks and an analytics platform
Money, Markets and the Road Ahead
Analysts project that global sports tech spending will nearly double from $34.25 billion in 2025 to $68.7 billion by 2030, reflecting a robust 14.9% CAGR . Europe, in particular, is poised for significant growth, with its sports technology market expected to reach $16.27 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 22.1% . This surge is fuelled by advancements in wearable technology, AI-driven performance analytics, and immersive fan engagement platforms. Emerging white spaces include female-specific training algorithms, race-day logistics (such as bib resale and insurance), and cross-sport avatars that carry performance data from padel to peloton.
As passionate athletes/sports fan ourselves and firm believers in Europe's potential to cultivate global category leaders, we are intensifying our efforts to connect with the visionary founders driving this transformation. This is an open invitation to founders, investors, and operators in the sports tech sector: our inbox is always open for conversations about these exciting developments :)
More on RAMP's scoring method
The ranking of these startups is based on the estimated momentum of the company but the algorithm does not assess the quality or reliability of the products/solutions developed by these companies!
Find out about the algorithm behind this ranking and the way scores are calculated here: Cheat sheet on RAMP
In case you missed them, our latest top 10s are here:
HR Tech (March25), Open Source AI (Feb25), Agentic AI (Jan25), French Tech (Dec24)
All the previous Top 10s are here.
Leading Okeiro's series A: Extending healthier lives for chronic disease patients
We are thrilled to announce our investment in Okeiro, co-leading their $10M Series A round with our friends at Alven and Forepont.
Did you know that by 2040, Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) will rank 5th in global mortality? Okeiro is pioneering precision medicine with a clinical decision support platform designed to transform transplant patient care. By leveraging groundbreaking AI technology, including the clinically validated iBox predictive algorithm, Okeiro accurately forecasts organ survival, enabling real-time monitoring, informed clinical decisions, and significantly improved patient outcomes. You can read Joseph’s excellent blog post on this exciting journey here.
Portfolio news:
Resilience enrolled the first patient in its large‑scale RC‑102 randomised clinical trial of remote patient monitoring in oncology. The study will follow 1,458 patients across 45 hospitals in France, Belgium and Germany to measure quality‑of‑life, morbidity and health‑economic outcomes, an essential step toward mainstream, evidence‑based RPM for cancer care. (More here).
Robovision released version 5.9 of its vision‑AI platform, introducing Foundation‑Assisted Labelling (powered by the Segment Anything Model) to cut annotation time, real‑time inference monitoring to flag model drift, and an emulator camera plus OPC‑UA connectivity for safer, easier factory‑floor deployments. (More here)
WeMaintain secured a five‑year HK$68 million (≈ US$9–10 million) contract to maintain Hong Kong’s 300‑km metro network and relocated two co‑founders to the city. With a 30‑person hiring push underway, the company projects that Asia will become its biggest market within 15–18 months. (Maddyness)
Pierrick, CEO of Okeiro, joined BFM Business’s “French Tech” program to explain how the startup’s AI models help transplant patients and aim to prevent kidney, liver, heart and lung failure—underscoring Okeiro’s mission to carry clinical insights straight into day-to-day care (video here)
Early-April Los Angeles Off-Site Recap
This April, the Red River West team gathered in Los Angeles for our yearly off-site. We refined our strategic roadmap, set clear goals for the next investment cycle, and brainstormed new ways to better support our founders. Of course, the off-site featured its usual fascinating debates, including our favorite ongoing discussion: when exactly AGI (and even ASI) might show up! As always, walks along Malibu Beach sparked tons of fresh and creative ideas.
This LA tradition continues to be productive, and genuinely enjoyable and always reminds us why we love building Red River West together!
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