Cricket is more than just a sport in India, it is a culture, an emotion, a fervour if you will. However, for Gagan Daga, a software engineer, the sport has been the reason behind his entrepreneurial plunge in the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.
Today, Daga is the founder of sports tech startup str8bat, which is focussed on making technology accessible to facilitate an advanced level of sports training. In this endeavour, the founder has started with cricket, offering cricket tech that helps players bring out their ‘A’ game.
The startup’s flagship product, cricket bat sensor, captures multiple aspects of a bat when in play to help players understand how they can improve their bat speed, impact and angle.
Daga’s quest has intrigued us quite a bit, and why not? Well, the new-age sports tech entrepreneur, quite naively, admitted to being unable to find the purpose of his life, despite having climbed the corporate ladder quite high in his more-than-a-decade-long corporate career.
Now, before we dive into how Daga found his true calling by building a sports tech startup, let’s shine some light on his early days.
After working with Infosys for a brief period of nearly one year, Daga joined a German software company SAP in 2004 where he served for more than a decade. During his stint at the German multinational, he climbed many corporate ranks, only to call it quits at the level of director of strategy in 2017.
“The decision was impulsive but driven by the motive to find life’s true calling,” Daga said, adding that the path did not come easily.
After groping in the dark for several years, he decided to give a shot to an executive management and leadership programme, designed specifically for senior executives, at INSEAD.
Notably, the transition had been in the making for two years before he finally left his handsomely paying job to start up. This was where (INSEAD) he clung to the idea of entrepreneurship, and upon deeper introspection, thought of combining his passion (cricket) with technology. The seeds of str8bat were sown precisely at this moment.
The Idea Of A Sports Tech
By the time Daga completed the executive programme, he had enough time to connect with his creative side, for he had left the corporate rat race far behind to forge on the path less travelled.
It was during this time that he also got nostalgic about his childhood passion, cricket. “I used to play at amateur leagues but had to stop due to my demanding profession,” Daga said.
While taking a trip down memory lane, he realised that the game lacked the tech support to enhance the skills of players, especially batsmen, who wanted to play professionally. Not to mention, the eureka moment gave Daga what he had been looking for — purpose.
“I noticed a significant gap in the market for cricket-related equipment. While technology was advancing and supporting athletes in many other sports, cricket offered limited options for tech integration,” Daga said.
With renewed vigour, Daga joined forces with IBM’s digital transformation leader Rahul Nagar and the director of business development (South Asia) for Mastercard Madhusudan Ranganathan to incorporate str8bat in 2017.
Revolutionising Cricket At The Grassroots
During the early stages of planning, the founders decided to use technology to help batsmen better understand their form and enhance their game. To achieve this, they drew inspiration from inertial measurement units (IMUs), commonly used in aircraft and satellites.
Notably, planes have relied on IMUs (comprising accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers) for decades to measure linear acceleration, angular velocity, and magnetic field strength. These units have also found applications in sports like basketball and volleyball, where they track an athlete’s body position, balance, and joint angles. Coaches in the West have long used such data to optimise training programmes.
While borrowing the concept seemed like a big win, it wasn’t as easy as Daga had thought. “Every shot has thousands of data points. Using these, we can recreate the entire motion of a shot in 3D, without using a camera. However, there were still multiple issues with the tech that delayed its adoption,” the founder said.
A major hurdle was the size of the IMU sensor, which was as big as a mobile phone. Hence, a key task was to shrink its size to make it fit on a bat more seamlessly. Over the next few years, the tech team at str8bat had to make about 80 hardware and 60 software adjustments to the traditional IMU sensor to bring it to pocket size. Despite the hiccup, MS Dhoni’s cricket academy was one of the first institutions to test their tech in 2018.
Today, str8bat sensors are an impeccable piece of technology, providing batsmen with instant, actionable insights into their form, bat speed, lift angle, impact pitch map, and more.
After perfecting the tech, the str8bat founders onboarded several other institutes and teams, including Rajasthan Royals, as its clients.
With this, they embarked on to find a product-market fit for the str8bat sensor in the retail market. However, soon the unexpected happened and the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. During this time, Daga saw an opportunity to build a name for str8bat before going to the market. Therefore, he created a digital IP.
“When the pandemic hit, we couldn’t just sit back. Instead, we focussed on building an ecosystem with coaches. We created Str8Talk, a platform where we spoke with legends like Greg Chappell and discussed the future of cricket. It was a way to keep the community engaged while refining our product,” he said.
As cricket resumed after two years of disruption, the startup pivoted its go-to-market strategy to enter the retail space. However, shortly after hitting the market, the team found that a few were still not completely comfortable using the sensor.
To resolve this, the founders devised a clever solution and partnered with SG to launch a smart bat. The bat is designed in such a way that the sensor seamlessly blends with it, altogether eliminating the equation of discomfort.
The partnership changed the game for str8bat, which witnessed a spurt in its user base (now at 9,000). The founder said that the tech-enabled bat is their key revenue driver. Notably, the startup garnered INR 1.35 Cr in FY22 revenues, which soared 83% to INR 2.46 Cr in FY23. However, losses in FY23 stood at INR 1 Cr. Per the founder, the startup lapped up 5X more revenues YoY in FY24.
Str8bat’s Next Play?
Given the initial success of its partnership with SG, the startup is focussed on onboarding more OEMs. While str8bat retails its sensors separately for INR 6,499, OEM partnerships remain its primary focus as it scales.
“The focus now is on OEM partnerships, and we’re launching products like the Str8bat Light, which is designed for tennis-ball cricket. This will help us tap into OEMs designing bats for this market,” he said.
Another critical element for str8bat is bringing down the costs of its sensors. While Daga claims that the company has already managed to reduce the cost of sensors by 50%, it has yet to improve its operational efficiency.
On the software side, the founders want their app to be updated once every three weeks. Besides, the company is looking to add new features to its dashboard. These features will be sharply focussed on helping customers improve their skills while gamifying their improvement process.
With this in place, Daga believes that the startup will cross the 1Mn customer mark in the next five years. However, he doesn’t want to stop just yet. Daga is hopeful that the groundwork that the company has done in capturing motion data in cricket will help it expand into other sports moving forward. Eventually, the idea is to launch more products such as wearable sensors to improve bowling.
Since its inception, str8bat has raised $3.5 Mn. It has Exfinity Venture Partners, RTL, Eternal Capital, VCats Group, Techstars and SucSEED Indovation Fund on its cap table. str8bat locks horns with Smartcricket, ZSportTech and StanceBeam which offer bats with sensors.
As of now, while its partnerships with top-tier OEMs and cricketing institutions have cemented its credibility, the road ahead isn’t going to be easy, especially when competition is on the prowl.
[Edited by: Shishir Parasher]
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