VAY Sports AG

We teach computers to perfectly perceive and predict human motion, ensuring harmonic interaction between man and machine.

We have already built a product with +10k registered users that is out on the App- and Play-Store. We have entirely bootstrapped it and made our first subscription sales. Simultaneously, we successfully completed two paid prototype projects in Switzerland and Germany. One cooperation (LifeBonus) will certainly continue and convert in a long-term partnership, whereas we will be developing the human motion analysis for their partial state-financed injury prevention solution. Our completed MVP with the health insurance Helsana is currently being evaluated by their management and will be discussed for continuation in February. Further MVPs, many of them originated during our attendance at CES Las Vegas, will be evaluated in the upcoming weeks.

Potential applications of human pose estimation find themselves not only in sports but also in the health, corporate wellness, surveillance, and robotics sector. For any application provider, it is much more attractive to buy the technology as a service instead of developing and maintaining it in-house. Technology is advancing at a fast pace; continuous maintenance is required to always stay up to date. Once the core development phase for standard movements is completed, our service will be sold to multiple market participants at a competitive price.

In our two ongoing projects in Germany & Switzerland, we are currently focusing on the corporate health/health insurance sector. The estimated cost for work-related injuries sums up to 1% of a country's GDP (CHF 2 billion in Switzerland). In Switzerland, employers and insurance companies are interested (& obliged by law) to take all necessary measures to prevent injuries. Therefore, we are now targeting the DACH-region, with one project running in Switzerland and Germany.

VAY Sports is amongst the first companies that built an end consumer product based on computer vision human pose estimation. The VAY Fitness Coach is a fitness app that analyses human movements in real-time and can therefore provide insights during the training - a fully virtual personal coach, absolutely scalable as no direct human input is required.
The technology behind the product is human pose estimation, a certain kind of computer vision that analyses human posture and movements. While the fitness coach is a nice showcase, the technology has a very high potential to be applied in all different kinds of fields.
As the technology has been progressing at an incredible rate over the last two years and will continue to do so, it is very attractive for application providers to buy it as a service. In house development would require a dedicated team to develop and maintain the technology over years in order to stay up to date. Getting it fr om a service provider like us ensures to always be delivered state of the art software that is being maintained and updated frequently.
Amongst the fields wh ere we see human pose estimation applied are health, sports, entertainment, security, and autonomous driving.
A few use cases that we already established:
Sports Training: real-time feedback is extremely valuable in both amateur as well as professional sports. Automated training summaries are of high value for pro athletes. Computer models can be used for analysis and visualisation by coaches.
Sports Statistics: fully automated statistics on sports events without any additional sensors
Rehabilitation: repetitive tasks of patients must always be supervised, resulting in high cost (salaries) if not automated. human pose estimation delivers reliable results that can be interpreted in a fraction of the time.
Corporate Wellness Blue Collar: physically demanding jobs can benefit from coaching, be it in training or on site
Corporate Wellness Office Spaces: the results of bad posture in front of computer screens are costing companies and health insurances
Gait/posture analysis: computer models can support doctors in the screening procedure
Active Gaming: Human movements are directly mapped in game to control an avatar or perform actions
Reward Systems for physical activities
Surveillance: suspicious movements can be detected
Autonomous Driving: intents of pedestrians can be detected on time to save lives

Our solution, already implemented in the VAY Fitness Coach, uses the image from any single camera to infer human posture and movements. No hardware requirements, high robustness against environmental factors, and real-time analysis make our solution stand out. As it works with smartphone cameras and allows live feedback directly on the same device, it is very applicable for end consumer products.
We are focussing on our backbone technology to enable other businesses to build the applications on top. It is our goal to provide an easily accessible and reusable API in order to facilitate adaption, making us a pure SaaS provider in the end. In the meantime, we develop customised projects for our customers and partners in order to benefit from additional application showcases.
So far we have delivered two pilot projects:
The first one allows the bonus system of a Swiss health insurance to actually infer how active their clients are during a workout. It has been delivered in December 2019 and is currently evaluated. Chances are high that the technology will find its spot in one of the insurance's own two apps.
The second one has been created for a corporate health management provider. The project is supported by German disability insurances and pension plans, as extremely high costs arise for these institutions if blue collar workers do not perform physically demanding actions properly.
We have been approached by dozens of additional potential customers with different applications in mind. For this reason, we are currently working on an automated onboarding process for these businesses to evaluate the precision and reliability of our technology and assess applicability for their products.

Since the technology is very new, there are only a few startups which are pursuing a similar direction (Wrnch AI, Ariel AI, Morpho). None of them currently focus on establishing a SaaS model or creates easy-to-access APIs and SDKs, which we are already bringing in place and evaluating needs with our first business clients.

The upcoming market offers globally huge potential and different application possibilities. We believe the market (providing human pose analysis as a service) will not become saturated over the next five years. A significant separation will arise due to the already completed projects and the locality. Once we have successfully operating applications, the market offers substantial scaling opportunities.

We were able to gather a lot of image data for sports and health applications, making our algorithms more robust and faster. We are working closely with our clients in order to provide them with the most suitable APIs.

We currently develop customized projects for our clients, which are paid in an external software development pricing. In 2020, we expect CHF 550k revenue from software projects, which we then turn into SaaS agreements. Until 2024, project related revenue increases by around 30% per year.

Starting 2022, the SaaS revenue overtakes project related revenue and grows to CHF 10M in 2023.

With the projects we develop for our clients, we could keep going like we are right now easily. We consider the money we raise as growth money, which means we invest CHF 1'050'000 in team growth, mainly on the software development side, and CHF 450'000 in customer acquisition.

The full investment shall convert to 20% in equity. We are offering a seat on our board of directors for an investor with a strong background in business development.

In order to stay ahead of our slowly upcoming competition, we have to gather as much experience as possible and develop a unique service. This will force us to invest in cost-intensive R&D and to acquire qualified human resources. Furthermore, we have to show people the benefits of our solution, as it is something completely new that many cannot yet wrap their heads around. VAY represents Swiss Quality, which is the reason our headquarter and leading development will stay in Zurich. In order to provide the best product, we require the best developers - with Swiss salaries. Furthermore, we want to exhibit a very healthy and nourishing work environment with an excellent company spirit and employees sharing our vision, who feel part of the company and its success.

We have participated in the accelerator program of the Swiss Startup Factory and have now a strong strategic partner with the Swiss Startup Group. Furthermore, we have been accepted to the exclusive Microsoft for Startups Program.