A London sports-technology start-up whose 'smart rugby ball' and wearable sensors measure the ball and the players during matches.
Sportable makes sensors that measure what happens in a rugby match. Its best-known product is the Smart Rugby Ball, built with the ball maker Gilbert, which tracks the ball and the players in real time. The company also makes player-monitoring devices and an Impact Wearable, which has 80 smart textile sensors in the shoulders of a sports garment to measure the force of impacts. The data is meant to help players improve, give spectators a richer view of the game, and help referees make quick and accurate decisions, for example about forward passes.
Sportable was founded in 2015. Dugald Macdonald is its chief executive and Pete Husemeyer is named as a co-founder, with whom he went to school in Cape Town. Mr Husemeyer has an engineering degree and master's from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in nuclear engineering from Cambridge, which shows the technical depth behind the idea. Mr Macdonald has compared its potential to the effect Hawk-Eye had on cricket and tennis. The company's stated aim is: "With Sportable we want to revolutionize the way people engage with sport." It describes the idea as changing how people experience sport by combining action on the pitch with data.
Sportable is based in London; the country's sports-tech lists place it in Hackney, east London. Its smart ball was reported as used in Super Rugby Pacific, so the product has worked beyond the UK, and trade headlines say it set up a presence in Indiana in the United States and formed a partnership with the accounting software company Sage in 2024. These come from headlines we could see, not full articles. A job advert for a field test engineer shows the company runs hands-on testing of its equipment in real sports settings.
We did not find much about the company's culture. The founders came up with the idea as school friends, and the two founders bring engineering and mathematics backgrounds, so the company is likely to be technical and research-led, though that is our reading of the sources rather than a statement by the company. A small start-up of this kind often involves people working closely with coaches, referees and clubs when the equipment is tried out.
A business like this employs electronics and embedded-systems engineers who design the sensors that sit inside a ball, software and data engineers who process what the sensors record, and field test engineers who check the equipment in real matches. Sports scientists and analysts help explain the results to coaches, and commercial staff work with governing bodies, teams and manufacturers. Engineering, physics, maths, computer science and sport science are typical starting points. The company's website is the place to see what roles it currently lists.
Website: www.sportable.com
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