HYDERABAD: Chief national badminton team coach 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.
Harsha Vardhan Kommana and Ganesh Yaprala are the other co-founders of Matchday.ai, which was set up in 2019.
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,” Gopichand, who is now taking care of growth, channel partnerships and new product development at the company, told Telangana Today.
According to Gopichand, 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.
More than 200 players have already used this product, Gopichand told the daily. 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, according to the former All England champion. It was rolled out in India for the first time in the recently concluded BAI Senior Badminton Tournament in Hyderabad.
