On the ball: How StepOut is democratising football analytics
Sports tech startup StepOut’s technology helps enhance player and team performance by offering football analyses at affordable prices.
Sayak Ghosh and Jeet Karmakar were studying engineering at NIT Durgapur when they wondered why India, which has about 300-335 million football fans, ranks so low—127—on FIFA’s website.
“Growing up in Kolkata, we saw a lot of talented players in popular football spots. It was very hard for us to believe that available talent wasn’t translating to the highest levels,” Ghosh says.
The reason behind this, they found out, was that Indian players and teams lacked access to sports analytics.
“We thought that if we could create an ecosystem that would identify talented players at the right age and provide that information to teams looking for such talent, it would help those players develop professionally,” he adds.
The duo started ideating in 2017, and in October 2020, they incorporated StepOut—a sports tech startup that offers affordable sports analyses to its clients. The startup remained in the minimum viable product (MVP) stage until it launched an app in July 2023.
StepOut, a sports performance analysis and ecosystem technology startup oscillating between Bengaluru and Kolkata with no sole headquarters, enhances player and team performance through data and video analysis, helping identify areas for improvement and track progress over time.
A report in BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation positively correlates data-driven analysis with a player’s performance and injury prevention. “Data-driven evaluations also help scouts recruit the right players for their teams,” says Founder and CTO Karmakar.
How it works
StepOut offers two products: Total Management System (TMS) and an app for athletes.
TMS, a SaaS platform that analyses matches and players, primarily targets coaching staff. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for in-depth football data and video analysis.
The app, meanwhile, allows players (of teams that have subscribed to StepOut’s services) to access their stats and highlights of their games, as well as it keeps a record of their achievements.
Karmakar says TMS is camera-agnostic. “All we need is the video feed. The jersey numbers of the players should be visible, and the video should be at a minimum quality of 1080p,” he explains.
The system assigns a tracker to each player in the feed, which records all their actions, and the software simulates the game. “We will have the entire match digitally coded in a binary sequence of zeroes and ones. That is our major contribution. Once we have that, each and every action that has been recorded and coded can be visualised in any manner for further analysis,” he says, adding that the app isn’t as data-driven and is a more gamified version of TMS.
Since the sports tech startup’s goal is to democratise match analytics, it functions on modest setups. “If you look at the top-tier leagues, 22 cameras cover the match. Additionally, technologies like lane tracking and video assistant referee (VAR) are deployed. Such robustness can’t be expected in the camera setups of youth leagues and clubs. Our software can successfully analyse matches with a one-camera setup,” Ghosh says.
The startup also creates a digital profile of players, with details of how they performed in their previous seasons for scouts to get a comprehensive picture of a player's abilities and shortcomings.
StepOut charges €100 (about Rs 9,583) per match from foreign clubs and €40 (about Rs 3,876) from Indian clubs. If catering to a single player, it charges €30 (about Rs 2,906) per game.
Getting started
Ranjit Bajaj, the owner of Minerva Academy, a sports academy based in Mohali and Chandigarh, noticed StepOut in 2021 when he sold football club Punjab FC and became the owner of Delhi FC.
“He (Bajaj) really appreciated our technology, although it was at a very primitive level back then. It was during the pandemic, and Delhi FC was starting. He provided us with some of their match videos, and we started working,” says Ghosh, Founder and CEO of StepOut.
The Delhi FC team won the Delhi Premier League (then Delhi Senior Division League) that season and got promoted to I-League 2. “That gave us a lot of confidence in what we were doing,” Ghosh says.
StepOut also worked with Mohammedan Sporting Club, who were playing in I-League 2 then, and helped them get promoted to the I-League.
However, what legitimised StepOut was the acquisition of AFC Ajax—the most successful club in the Netherlands and one of the most prestigious football clubs in Europe.
“We had applied to an online event called Reimagine Football in June 2022. We just wanted to see where we stand, but we ended up as one of the finalists. During the finals, we got an opportunity to pitch to many established football organisations, including AFC Ajax,” Ghosh says.
The football club was “very impressed” with the robustness of the data StepOut’s system generated, which they had to do manually. “We were declared the winners of the event, which gave us an opportunity to do a pilot project with AFC Ajax. They have been working with us for three years now,” he adds.
StepOut now has over 30 clients across multiple countries and is conducting pilot projects with some of the biggest football clubs in the world, including FC Barcelona, Tottenham Hotspur, and Atlético Madrid, among others.
The startup’s 21-member team is divided between Bengaluru and Kolkata.
Funding and future plans
StepOut raised seed funding of $500,000 in July 2024 led by Rainmatter, the investment arm of Nithin Kamath’s Zerodha.
“We are looking to raise a pre-Series A round primarily to kickstart our international growth plans. We have penetrated international markets and aim to capture a majority market share in those countries,” Ghosh says.
StepOut has grown from approximately Rs 24 lakh in FY24 to about Rs 88 lakh in FY25. It is targeting a Rs 8 crore (near $1 million) annual recurring revenue (ARR) over the next two years.
The B2B and B2B2C startup competes with global sports tech companies like US-based Hudl, UK-based Opta Sports, and South Korea-based Bepro, among others.
StepOut wants to go beyond football in the future. “We are thinking of adapting our technology to incorporate hockey and basketball. They are also sports based on passing and scoring. We also want to get into cricket and tennis, where the game mechanisms are completely different,” Karmakar says.
(The copy was updated with additional information.)
Edited by Suman Singh