After operating solely in tennis for four years, SwingVision expanded its app in December to bring AI stats, highlights, and line calling into pickleball. Now, the company’s CEO Swupnil Sahai can see a future where pickleball usage surpasses tennis on the platform.
“Overall we have a little over 15,000 subscribers and pickleball is in the single-digit percentage of that. Our goal is to get [pickleball] to 50 percent of the user base by the end of the year, ideally more,” Sahai, a former AI engineer at Tesla, told NoVolleys. “I think more people can play pickleball than tennis, it’s just lower barriers to entry. My hope is that long term we have more people playing pickleball than tennis.”
Investors in SwingVision include Tennis Australia and former tennis stars Andy Roddick, Lindsay Davenport, and James Blake, who co-owns the Milwaukee Mashers in Major League Pickleball.
The company has raised around $9 million in total funding and now collaborates with pickleball community influencers such as Ed Ju to promote SwingVision on social media.
AI Stats, Highlights and Line Calling—With Scoring on the Way
iPhone or iPad users can download the SwingVision app and point their device toward the pickleball court or purchase a stand, like the $100 Swing Stick sold by SwingVision.
SwingVision’s AI provides shot-tracking stats such as velocity and the type of hit (forehand, backhand, etc) as well as automated video highlights and instant line calling to help officiate matches.
“The most popular feature is the highlights, the fact that you could watch the best points and longest rallies,” said Sahai. “Customers that have an Apple Watch are really able to get the most out of this because as soon as a really good rally happens, they can just bookmark it with a button on their watch so it’s very easy to make highlight reels.”
SwingVision’s free tier includes two hours of video recording per month. Its pro tier includes 30 hours of recording per month and unlimited cloud storage billed at $180 annually ($15 monthly.)
“The thing that everybody’s asking us about is scoring,” Sahai said. “On the tennis side we just launched this new feature where we’ll automatically add a scoreboard onto your video to keep score for you point by point. So that’s what we’re going to be delivering for pickleball this quarter.”
More Data Needed for Elite Line Calling Accuracy
Sahai says that SwingVision’s AI is at a “high 90s” percentage accuracy level in tennis, but drops down to the “mid 80s” percentage in pickleball. But pickleball has only been offered by SwingVision for a few months, and its line calling will improve as more people record play.
“I think by this summer we’ll be at the same accuracy level on pickleball,” Sahai said. “It’s really just data. We’ve had the tennis product in the market for like four years so we’ve had so many people using it all around the world,” he adds. “With that said, what’s kinda cool about our company is that we were able to reuse a lot of the tennis data for building the pickleball AI so we kind’ve had a head start over anyone else building something similar.”
PlaySight is another company that’s developing an AI line calling system for pickleball. Sahai says he’s already had conversations with Division-I college tennis programs about using SwingVision for automated line calling.
Sony’s Hawk-Eye Live provides automated line calling to grand slam tennis events such as the US Open and Australian Open. Can SwingVision’s AI eventually provide the same for pro pickleball leagues?
“Yeah definitely,” Sahai says. “Probably we’d wanna have multiple cameras just to have the best accuracy possible, but I certainly see that being the case,” he added. “Our line calls are already instant, within half a second we know what happened. So we could actually deliver that Hawk-Eye Live experience to pro pickleball, I think it’s not that far away actually.”
Coming to a Pickleball Club Near You?
The model for SwingVision thus far has been direct-to-consumer, with its 15,000+ subscriber base largely being payments from individual players. But Sahai sees the future of SwingVision being partnerships with pickleball clubs for players to get complimentary access to the system.
“When you think about how can we make this experience even better, ideally you wouldn’t have to set up your own phone, there would just be a device already there on the court and you just maybe scan a QR code and that’s it,” Sahai said. “That would involve partnering with clubs and having hardware installed on the court.”
SwingVision already partners with USTA Florida and was named the official player and ball-tracking app of Tennis Australia, the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA), and Great Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association (LTA). Bay Area-based SwingVision expects to begin installation pilots with pickleball clubs this year, likely starting in California.
“We’re actually going to be doing some pilots of that this year so I’m hopeful that’s going to be the model long term,” Sahai said. “We’ll still have this direct-to-consumer model in the meanwhile, but it is our hope that 5-10 years from now that every club has a camera on it, that should be the future we’re trying to build.”