Howzat for growth?
Cricket tech firm’s domination
It started as a handful of staff, under a veteran club captain, with an unstable scoring app for cricket. Five years later, CricHQ is seeking dominance of the global cricket software as a service market, a year on from raising US$10 million from a Singaporean investment fund. With well over 100 staff, the majority of whom are in India, it already claims to record one in every 10 balls bowled in organised cricket globally, and is targeting one in every two within four years. But while scoring cricket remains integral to the business, the efforts of CricHQ, now operating from offices in a former restaurant in Kelburn, are increasingly directed elsewhere, from competition management to data mining, to live streaming games at all levels. Mike Loftus, appointed executive chairman earlier this year, said virtual reality cameras could soon allow grandparents to watch 12 year-olds ‘‘as if you were standing in the umpire’s shoes’’. ‘‘It’s going to change the way people watch sport. You place a 360 degree camera anywhere on the ground or on the umpire or on the player, or wherever it is, and you can watch the game as if you were on the field playing the same,’’ he said. CricHQ was founded by Simon Baker, the combative Karori Cricket Club captain, who infamously ran out a schoolboy with the ‘‘mankad’’ dismissal, where the bowler removes the bails of a non-striker who has backed up too far.
Baker recruited former Black Cap captains Stephen Fleming and Brendon McCullum as shareholders, helping give the company profile and opening cricketing doors.
Although when it was launched it was briefly among the world’s most downloaded sporting apps, there was little obvious sign of what was to come.
Baker is now based in the UK, and the company’s staff are spread across a number of countries, as it bids to become global.
As time has gone on, the world of cricket has come to know the company, with high profile shareholders used ‘‘hardly at all’’ to open doors.
‘‘The cricket world now recognises CricHQ,’’ Loftus said.
CricHQ has signed up 49 international cricketing bodies as customers, and while most are minnows, the group includes New Zealand, Sri Lanka and South Africa.
Loftus said it is in talks with all other test playing nations – bar Australia, which has developed its own scoring platform.
Crucial to winning the global market will be winning favour in India, by far the biggest cricket market on earth, and accordingly most of the CricHQ’s staff are based there, with eight in New Delhi and 80 in Kochi.
It was all about talent identification. Helping to identify the next Sachin Tendulkar. CricHQ executive chairman Mike Loftus
‘‘It’s a market that not many Western companies can move into and have faith that they’re doing the right thing in because there’s so many intricacies and unique things in India,’’ Loftus said.
Some of India’s major regional cricketing bodies have already officially adopted the technology. The initial interest was not the scoring itself, but the chance to search the country’s millions of
players for potential stars.
‘‘It was all about talent identification. Helping to identify the next Sachin Tendulkar,’’ Loftus said, using the mining of data to uncover talent which may otherwise be held back by bias or politics.
It is the massive amount of data which is likely to yield the most value and more innovative services.
‘‘We now have 10 per cent of cricket balls bowled through our platform, either through live scoring or after the game,’’ Loftus said.
‘‘We want to be up to 40-50 per cent within two or three years of the world cricket market. The bigger your base becomes, the more opportunity there is to monetise that base.’’
Mining of the data could have a range of possible uses, from talent identification, to detecting match fixing, to developing betting odds.
While match predictors already use analytics from the history of cricket, CricHQ may soon begin generating a ball predictor.
‘‘Going through the history of cricket, and the situation, and this player and that player in the situation, what will the ball be,’’ Loftus said.
‘‘This bowler would usually bowl it full pitch, and this batsman would usually hit that for six.’’
Not all of the apps’ potential comes from sophisticated technology, with CricHQ claiming to offer sporting bodies services which are so simple it is a wonder they are not already mainstream.
This includes the often laborious process of working out when particular teams will play on particular fields.
‘‘In 90 per cent of the world, competition management is a bunch of guys sitting around with a bunch of teams and grounds and umpires, trying to match up week by week by week the season, and it takes literally days to put that together,’’ Loftus said.
‘‘Within three minutes you can have the same thing done using our platform.’’
The app is also trialling push notifications to remind players to register, and a payment platform for doing so.
‘‘If you’ve played for a club, you’ll basically get a notification saying ‘do you want to play again this year, here’s your bill for $230, pay now’ sort of thing,’’ Loftus said
‘‘That’s something that’s not done by any sport, anywhere else, in the world.’’
It is also an area where the app is looking to move into other sports. The basics of player registration, as well as competition management, are the same the world over. The jump from cricket would be a short one, and Loftus said the steps are being considered.
The company’s potential was highlighted in June 2015, when Baker and Fleming announced Tembusu Partners was investing US$10m (NZ$13.4m) to fund its expansion.
Loftus would not give details of whether the company was now profitable, or if it needed more cash.
‘‘There’s potential for a whole range of different options to grow further and raising funds if need be, but we may not need to.’’