StepOut has raised $1.5 million during its Pre-Series A round. This is an important capital investment led by Rainmatter by Zerodha, which is yet another confidence vote by the investment firm that also pioneered the seed round of the company in late 2024. Other prominent investors, including SucSEED Innovation Fund and Misfits Capital, were also involved in the latest round.

Startup plans and focus

The investment is timely enough since StepOut would be trying to establish its role in the international sport intelligence market. The new proceeds gained by the company will be used strategically to broaden its international operations and enhance its technological moat. The startup will invest more in artificial intelligence and computer vision, as well as expand its general product capacity.

Jeet Karmakar and Sayak Ghosh are the founders of StepOut. StepOut has established a reputation as an Artificial Intelligence-based football performance and intelligence solution. It mostly deals with player development, match analysis, and scouting. The site is meant to be flexible, serving the interests of different tiers of the game e.g,. youth academies, semi-professional teams, and professional football clubs at the highest levels.

The platform by StepOut offers a complete package of tools that can automate and improve the consumption of football data. These have AI-assisted match analysis, auto highlight, and performance dashboards. Analytics of live matches and other advanced football metrics like Expected Goals (xG), Expected Assists (xA), Passes Per Defensive Action (PPDA), and special player impact scores are also valuable to coaches and analysts.

Growth and strategic partnership

StepOut has shown tremendous growth in its operations since the last funding round. The startup boasts of having analysed over 25,000 matches and is tracking over 150,000 players. This evidence-based model has been translated to high business performance, where the company has recorded a 3x year on year revenue growth and a high customer renewal rate of 90%. 

Startup has a wide portfolio of 120 clubs, academies, and federations in 23 countries. It has used its technology to conduct high-profile tournaments, including the Dream Sports Championship and several elite domestic tournaments. This network presence underscores the universality of the platform and the need for high-tech sports analytics everywhere.

StepOut has developed working relationships with a number of high-profile football entities. It already has such major clients as AFC Ajax, Rayo Vallecano, Bengaluru FC, Hong Kong FC, and the All India Football Federation. These alliances can display the fact that the platform can address the most stringent requirements of the highest-level international and national organizations.

The company is also interacting with some of the largest football players in the world. StepOut is in pilot operation with international clubs like Real Madrid, Chelsea, Fulham, and Espanyol. These partnerships indicate that the startup will become a permanent part of the technological infrastructure of major football leagues in the world.

Although football is the central point of focus of StepOut, the firm has definite plans to expand its products. The part of the strategic roadmap that this Pre-Series A round will finance is that, with time, an expansion into amateur sports and other types of sporting disciplines will be funded. By expanding its AI and computer vision capabilities to more aggressively cover more sports, StepOut will democratize the high-end performance analysis of athletes and teams across sports.

The effective round of funding by Rainmatter highlights the increasing value of sports-tech in India and other markets. With StepOut still developing its AI features and capabilities and going global, the platform is in the right position to revolutionize the way talent is discovered and performance is optimized in the industry.

Conclusion

The Pre-Series A round of $1.5 million that StepOut has completed is a milestone in its history in the modernization of sports performance using technology. The startup with thebacking of Rainmatter and other major investors is capable of transforming by establishing an intelligence platform based on football into a multi-sport global powerhouse. With its further integration of AI and increased involvement in the world-renowned clubs, StepOut is poised to make a significant contribution to the future of data-driven athlete development and scouting.