Bristol grad’s football AI startup wins £25k in supercomputer time

A student-founded company that uses smartphones and AI to film grassroots football matches has been awarded £25,000 worth of computing time on Isambard-AI, the world’s fastest university-made supercomputer based at the University of Bristol.

University of Bristol Computer Science students Philip Mortimer, Liam Jones, and Jeremy Colfer created Pitchwise alongside studying for their degrees and playing football together.

Using smartphones combined with AI-powered software, the group has worked to create a system that can follow grassroots football and bring the matches to life for local community clubs. They are in the process of developing an app which can automatically follow play, create highlights, and even provide performance stats for the game, just like you see in the Premier League.

During the process of his undergraduate dissertation, Philip developed the foundation of the AI element of the project, focusing on automated ball tracking. A year later, Jeremy and Liam took the concept further by building the hardware and companion app for their master’s theses, while Philip was studying for his master’s in AI and Machine Learning at Cambridge.

As recent graduates, they are now working full-time on Pitchwise. Currently collaborating with several local teams across Bristol, they are developing a much wider pilot programme.

Pitchwise was given 5,500 hours of free use on the Isambard-AI supercomputer through the UKRI AI Research Resource (AIRR) programme, supported by Innovate UK. This will enable the team to scale their computer-vision models, which would be too slow or expensive on typical cloud software, and experiment with new ideas more quickly to build better analytical tools for following action on the pitch.

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Launched in July this year and built by the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (in close partnership with HPE and NVIDIA), the £225m Isambard-AI facility can deliver in one second work that would take the global population 80 years to achieve. It is a key part of the government’s AI Research Resource (AIRR), alongside the DAWN system in Cambridge, and is designed to raise the country’s capabilities in advanced AI study.

Pitchwise’s award showcases national infrastructure supporting innovation, from UK government research in the AI fields of robotics, climate research, and drug discovery, to start-up companies using AI in areas such as sports.

As one of the first UK start-ups to receive this award, Pitchwise co-founder Liam Jones said: “This is a really nice full-circle story for the team, starting as a student venture at Bristol, and now using the university’s world-leading infrastructure to advance our technology and mission. It’s a huge boost in our journey to bring cutting-edge AI to community sport.”

He added, “The University of Bristol has played a huge role in our journey. Coming through the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, we’ve had access to incredible mentors who’ve been through the start-up process themselves and offered invaluable guidance. The prototyping labs there also allowed us to design and test our early hardware while still studying. On top of that, the Runway Programme has provided both financial support and the confidence to take Pitchwise from a student project to a growing business.”