South African sports technology platform MatchKit has been awarded the ‘Startup of the Year’ prize at the recent 2023 Sports Technology Awards in New York.
The Sports Technology Awards celebrates tech-led innovation in sport and is dubbed the ‘Oscars of Sports Technology’. The programme was founded in 2013 and evolves each year to reflect the important factors influencing sport. The award categories are judged by over 50 industry experts.
The 10th Sports Technology Awards was presented in association with NBC Sports Next and other winners included the NBA, Apple, Warner Bros. Discovery, World Athletics and the ICC.
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“Our tech has been used to power SA Hockey to the Tokyo Olympic Games, it was the vehicle for a movement to reward our Olympic medalists with more than R400,000 in less than a week when the Sports Ministry said its commercial coffers were empty, and more recently James Gerber has used our platform to put a young man through high school,” said MatchKit co-founder Mike Sharman, who accepted the award in New York. “To be rated as the best startup of the year, amongst the most cutting-edge technology and business solutions that the sports world has to offer, is absolutely unreal. The MatchKit team has worked tirelessly to get to this point and I wholeheartedly believe that this award is a stepping stone for our global ambitions. Our platform and the services offered will only get better from here.”
MatchKit was co-founded by Sharman, Bryan Habana, Shaka Sisulu, Ben Karpinski and Carli Schoeman, and since the platform went live in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 it has signed up over 2500 athletes.
