What Became of Angular Velocity's EIC Accelerator Tracker

On 19 August 2024 Angular Velocity Oy, a Finnish sports technology start-up, was recorded as ceased in the Finnish trade register, according to the open data of the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH). Five years earlier the European Commission had picked it in the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, and granted it €2,414,721.75 for SPECTO Athletics, a lidar system meant to measure jumps, throws and sprints live during competitions, according to CORDIS. The company's data was broadcast from the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha and on Finnish television. The consumer app at the heart of the plan has no recorded launch, and the last public accounts show revenue of €125,000.

Business information services Asiakastieto and Kauppalehti both mark the company's operations as ceased. Its website is still online and still advertises the products, but its four news posts carry no year, and those that can be dated refer to 2020.

A Company That Left the Register

The PRH record lists Angular Velocity's trade register entry as "Ceased" from 19 August 2024 and its VAT registration as ended the same day. The free open data shows no bankruptcy or liquidation entry, and none of the business information services consulted gives the reason the company ceased. Whether it was wound up voluntarily, struck off by the registrar or ended through insolvency could not be verified from public sources. North Data also marks the company as dissolved; the last event it records is a word mark filed in October 2021.

What survived is the product the company started with. SPECTO Bowling, a ball-tracking sensor for bowling lanes, was built as "a joint venture with Kegel LLC from Florida", according to Angular Velocity's own history page. The system is now sold under Kegel's name: the Specto Bowling website carries a Kegel copyright and a Florida address, and Kegel's company timeline records Specto Go, a portable version, in 2020 and a new Specto Live module in 2025. The Specto Bowling app in the app stores still carries the package name com.angularvelocity.specto. Who owns the Specto rights after Angular Velocity's closure has not been published.

The Technology: Lidar at the Side of the Runway

Performance data in athletics is usually gathered in laboratories or from video after the event. Angular Velocity proposed to measure in the stadium, in real time, without markers on athletes or equipment. Its product page says it used "multiple different LiDAR based sensors and/or depth mappers" placed beside the runway, adapted from the bowling sensor. In triple jump it measured the athlete's maximum speed and where it was reached, the distance to the take-off board, and the length of the hop, step and jump; in pole vault, runway velocity and bar clearance; in shot put, release angle and speed. The data was meant to feed a fan app and an interface for broadcasters.

The company built patents around the sensor set-up. Google Patents lists a Finnish patent, FI128085B, granted on 13 September 2019 for measuring a sports performance and displaying the results, with a European application still pending after a first examination report on 19 November 2024 and a US application recorded as abandoned. A second Finnish patent, FI128636B for calibrating a sensor, was granted on 15 September 2020; its international application did not enter the European phase. A company news post on two new patents for calibration and alignment also announced the US registration of the SPECTO Athletics trademark, which USPTO data dates to 27 October 2020 (registration 6182099).

What the EU Grant Promised, and What the Record Shows

The European Commission's list of EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 winners names Angular Velocity Oy of Vantaa as the only company behind SPECTO Athletics; no partner companies are listed. The grant agreement was signed on 29 March 2019, and the project ran from 1 April 2019 to 31 August 2021 under the topic EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020. The EU covered 70% of the €3,449,602.50 budget. It was the company's second EU award: in 2018 it had received €50,000 from SME Instrument Phase 1 for a feasibility study on SPECTO Bowling 2.0.

The application on CORDIS said SPECTO Athletics had already been validated at the IAAF World U20 Championships in Tampere in July 2018, and that pilot agreements had been signed with Olympic training centres, broadcasters and sports federations. It promised a profit of €144 million and 59 direct jobs by 2025. The final report claims the Doha pilot, granted patents, and a consumer app that was ready to launch at the 2020 World Indoor Championships in Nanjing before the pandemic cancelled the event. "We are ready to launch as soon as general pandemic situation and financial situation improves," it says.

Some of this can be checked. The Finnish Research Institute for Olympic Sports, KIHU, validated the long jump and triple jump measurements, according to a company post dated 24 July. A later post said the system would track the horizontal jumps at the Finnish championships in Turku from 13 to 16 August, the dates of the 2020 championships, with the data shown in Yle's live broadcast, and that the app "will be published during the first half of 2021". No independent report on KIHU's validation, and no app release, could be found. The partners named on the company's website, including World Athletics and Yle, are not backed by any published contract either.

1. Live measurement at elite eventsDeliveredDoha 2019 set-ups pictured in the CORDIS report; Finnish championship coverage announced for 2020.
2. Patents on the sensor systemDeliveredFinnish patents granted in 2019 and 2020, per Google Patents.
3. Validated measurements across disciplinesPartlyLong and triple jump validated by KIHU, per the company; no evidence for vertical jumps, throws or sprints.
4. SPECTO Athletics fan appNot deliveredPromised for the first half of 2021; no release found.
5. €144M profit and 59 jobs by 2025Not achievedCompany ceased in 2024 with 18 staff in its last public accounts.

The Money

Only two years of figures are freely available. Asiakastieto shows revenue of €269,000 and an operating profit of €32,000 with 16 staff in the financial year it labels 01/2020, and revenue of €125,000, an operating loss of €346,000 and 18 staff in the year labelled 01/2021, when the equity ratio was minus 12%. Kauppalehti gives the same revenue to the cent: €124,749.98. No accounts for later years could be found in free sources.

Why Europe Should Care

The EU's current Work Plan for Sport 2024 to 2027 asks member states to "support work on innovation and digitalisation in sport as a driver for health, performance, economic development and a sustainable sports sector". Angular Velocity's application stressed that it would keep its product development in Europe, in a sports analytics market it said was concentrated on football. The case shows the limits of a model that depends on live events: the company's commercial plan rested on championships, and its final report says the pandemic first postponed and then cancelled the events at which its app was to launch.

The Verdict

Angular Velocity's former managers have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.