AN ambitious team of developers is looking to secure a whopping $50m worth of investment to accelerate the launch of STRIKR, a new boxing format.
While, at this stage, information surrounding the little-known company remains scarce, Sky News has reported that its tech-heads very much intend to ‘revolutionise’ the sport.
One of the most prominent gripes expressed by fans of the sweet science is, of course, in relation to the unfathomable nature of certain scorecards.
The majority of judges, it seems, have been guilty of producing a largely inaccurate reflection of at least one fight, leaving spectators with little choice but to accuse them of being incompetent or corrupt.
Wishing to remove this element of confusion, and indeed frustration, from the sport, STRIKR is set to provide objective scoring through its use of Artificial Intelligence.
This data-driven approach will seemingly be achieved by embedding sensors in combatants’ mouthguards, tracking the impact of each shot that is landed.
But still, there are a plethora of questions – not least regarding the calculation and analysis of body shots – that remain unanswered.
In any case, though, the creative minds behind STRIKR are in talks with potential investors who possess the financial might to elevate the implementation of their technology.
But once again, there is a lack of information on the identity of these investors and, perhaps more importantly, just how deep their pockets really are.
What we do know, however, is that former Olympic marketing chief Greg Nugent and Stephen Duval, the founder of sports and entertainment corporate finance group 23Capital and creator of Superset Tennis and Superfighter, are among those working behind the scenes to get STRIKR over the line.
“STRIKR is a new format of boxing that uses world-class technology to generate real-time objective scoring,” Duval told Sky News.
“It will create a different approach to fighting, using a new format, enabled by new technology, to engage the existing audience and attract a new one, to the benefit of the market overall.”
It is important to highlight, too, that AI-powered scoring has already been tried and tested in boxing.
Turki Alalshikh, for instance, introduced his own artificial judge for Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury’s rematch last December.
And while the AI technology had no bearing on the overall result of their heavyweight encounter, it nonetheless offered an insight into what the future of scoring could look like.
Meanwhile, the co-founders of Jabbr, a separate AI-powered video and stats software for combat sports, are in talks with commissions to implement this supposedly revolutionary technology sooner rather than later.
