As featured in Sports Business Journal:
The startup's team of experts will provide advice on motion capture system installation, data presentation, and implementation.
World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We empower your biomechanics with seamless motion-capture solutions from cutting-edge hardware to expert data management and visualization.”
Company: S3D Sidekick
Location: Los Angeles, California
Year founded: 2023
Website/App: https://www.s3dinc.com/
Funding round to date: “Series A”
Who are your investors? “ENTORIN VENTURES LLC is an angel investor, and we have $1.2 million."
Are you looking for more investment? “Yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO Stephanie Insler-Matthews: “I started as a student athlete in my college years dealing with injuries myself. As I graduated, I came out of it knowing I wanted to help athletes but not knowing how. I finished my fourth year as a soccer player at Chico State and had a pretty big injury, which landed me in surgery with Dr. Mandelbaum out of Santa Monica. He happened to be one of the largest U.S. soccer doctors in the nation. I just bugged him until I could do some work with him because I knew I wanted to help athletes not have to deal with everything I was dealing with. I started doing some research with Dr. Mandelbaum and Holly Silvers in Santa Monica. We worked on a project with FIFA, we looked at 60 different schools across the U.S. on injuries and created a warm-up for soccer teams. We realized this warm-up we worked with FIFA had then over time decreased injuries by about 60%. There was no intervention, it was just a warm-up. I thought that was so amazing that we could have such a huge impact on athletes without having to go in and put them into physical therapy or put them into a specific training or change the way they were training. I realized that biomechanics was something I was grossly interested in. I came out of it, continued to do research, which led me to Dr. Powers in Los Angeles and I started running his lab out there. His lab used Simi Motion and I ran that system for about three years creating reports. That really jumped me into working for Simi. I worked for Simi for about seven years, ending as the COO, and decided there was still this gap in translating the data on the athlete or how the athlete moved, to the athlete. How do we translate this data or information to an athlete to make sense to an athlete? And then there’s the other side of it, because of my experience working with doctors, understanding after surgery what kind of rehab or facilitation needed to be put in place with the doctor being involved. A lot of times an athlete would go get surgery, say thanks to the surgeon and then go to the PT. Those two people often don’t talk very much, and I wanted to help bridge the gap between the doctors and physical therapists or trainers.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “My co-founder is Alec Miller. He was with me at Simi for about five years. He’s the brains behind the building of everything. He’s the coder, he has about 12 years of experience managing big data, as well as managing motion capture data. He has a Masters in biomechanics, which allows him to not only understand coding but also understand biomechanics. You usually get one or the other.”
How does your platform work? “We look at ourselves as an end-to-end, all-encompassing consulting company. We range from reselling systems these technology companies create or build to then providing services that automate their technologies, and also automates the data management processes and output. You can jump on it at any time. If you’re a new owner to a facility and you’re looking for a motion capture system, we can start with you there, understanding what system is best for your facility, all the way to the install, working with contractors to them understanding the workflow of having to capture the data, manage the data and the visualize the data in our agnostic dashboard. We’ve built a dashboard that then houses all the data in one location, so coaches, owners and trainers can all view this data in one location, and then it also provides access for athletes. Whether you’re brand new and have never seen a system before and need information on a system or need a biosystem, we can start with you there. Or, if you’re an expert in the field and been using a system for 10 years now and really want to automate the processes around it, and empower the knowledge you have on biomechanics and what you are doing with the athlete, we can work with you on that as well, getting you into this agnostic dashboard and housing all your data in one location and managing the needs of that.”
What problem is your company solving? “The No. 1 problem is data management and visualization, customizing visualization based on athletic performance. We can code reports that state something along the lines of like, if this is happening go this way with the report, or if this is happening go this way with the report. It’s custom to what is happening in that movement, and to what the client wants to see based on the data.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “The products range, as we resell hardware from different vendors. Our own S3D dashboard has an annual fee that ranges from $8,000-$20,000 per year depending on their configuration. We then have a trial slab that goes along with that, it’s about $2 per trial per year. The number of trials the athlete has in their dashboard depicts the package they purchase. Our development hours are $285 an hour, so if there is any customization around anything that’s $285. Our support service hours are $190 per hour, which includes hardware and software on-call support. Our target customers are athletes, all the way from youths to professionals. When I say athlete, I say that in a very vague format because I really mean athletes from all levels at sports facilities/clubs. These training facilities encompass athletes from a youth age all the way to a professional, whether it’s a sports training facility, a university, a pro team or an affiliate.”
How are you marketing your product? “We are doing trade shows and conferences, and we are trying to do as much social media and marketing as we can. I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years and I have a lot of relationships I’ve built, so a lot of it is word of mouth.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We can scale pretty quickly. Our dashboard is pretty self manageable and encompassing. We’re always doing updates and upgrades, making it as in front of the line of the market as we can always. That’s always happening. However, our engineers continue to grow, so our team continues to grow. My goal is to have the feeling we are the preferred dashboard for every vendor, athlete, facility in sports.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “We get that question a lot and are learning more as we go to different conferences. There are a lot of different companies that do little pieces of what we do, and we also support some of the things our competitors do. I have a hard time saying we have a direct competitor that’s encompassing the end-to-end solution around motion capture from resell to data output. When we talk about data management, some of our competitors are someone like Teamworks, a big company that is bringing all this data into one location, Datablocks is another company people are starting to compare us to, along with Reboot Motion.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “It’s the experience my team has. We’ve encompassed a team from different markets to ensure we understand the details from day one of what has happened with this technology to where it is now and where it can go. We have over 20 years of experience in motion capture, we have over eight years of force plate experience – that’s what Will (Lehmann) brings, our lead sales engineer who was with Kislter for eight years. Myself, Ethan (Venosa) and Alec were all with Simi for over five years. Being a part of the initial wave of motion capture in professional sports through the Major League Baseball industry is something that no one else will have that experience in touching all of the data from all the different motion capture systems.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “A big milestone for us was developing our dashboard, getting that out and launching it. I know that sounds kind of vague for most people, but this was a very huge project to get everything to be digestible into one location. The infrastructure is done and we’ve launched it last week. Having three clients signed up already for it was huge.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “The first one is innovation. Understanding of staying ahead of the market and understanding our market is something we are constantly seeking and implementing to drive the progress in motion capture. The second is precision, understanding the precision behind this data and the commitment to have we to producing these types of reports is extremely important to keeping our clients also in front of the market. The third is collaboration. That’s huge for me. Getting as many parties and teams involved is a big goal for me. I will always say I don’t know everything and I think that having as many people involved will make the strongest team possible. Integrity is always with us. We always live with honesty and are very truthful with the way we are working. We’re also customer-centric. We realize this market is a very customer-based market. We have to understand what the customers need and want, and we’re going to continuously build off the feedback we’ve received from those customers.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “For me, the No. 1 thing is client satisfaction. You can grow as big as you want, but if your clients aren’t satisfied it’s really not a successful result. Having my clients satisfied is the most successful thing you can have. The second thing, and maybe this is because I’m a new CEO, but employees’ satisfaction. This sounds funny, but keeping a strong team as I have over the years and it hasn’t been the easiest thing has been extremely important to me. I’ve been through a lot of companies and keeping good employees and keeping them motivated is really important. Ultimately, I think these partnerships and collaborations are where I want to grow my company. Building who we reach is extremely important.”
What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “If you look over the last 20 years of my path, you can see that nothing has wavered too much. My focus has been pretty clear in terms of helping decrease injuries in athletes and increase the communication between doctors and athletes, trainers or coaches. My continued focus and growth over the years allows my customers and investors or anyone to trust they can believe in the continued growth we are continuing to have.”
Does S3D Sidekick resonate best with any particular sports? “The first interest comes from baseball, and I only think that’s because that’s where the most experience is. However, there is interest now coming from every sporting market out there, from fencing to lacrosse to shotput to hockey to anything. The reason is because you don’t only have to capture in-game, you can look at performance metrics from a jumping perspective, from a weight lifting perspective, from a training perspective, so even if it’s a gymnast or a horseback rider, how are they performing outside of their sport, and that can help with their decrease in injuries and longevity of their performance.”