This startup serves sharp insights and graphics to help athletes and sports academies up their game

A couple of years ago, PhD researchers Shyam Sivaramakrishnan and Shankar Sivaramakrishnan were at the Squash World Cup in Chennai, churning valuable insights backed by high-quality visuals for broadcast.

They were integrating motion graphics with real-time data to display statistics such as shot types, error rates, and hand usage—in a sophisticated manner never seen before in professional squash broadcast.

After the event, many broadcasters and event organisers approached them, eager to bring the same level of visual appeal and data-driven insights to smaller sporting events, in an affordable way.

In the fast-paced world of competitive sports, data is a gold mine, and proper use of it can open a window of opportunity for sportspersons, training academies, and sports leagues to up their game.

However, collecting and analysing this data is a slow, manual and expensive process. Sporting teams and athletes often struggle with outdated analysis tools. Access to high-quality data is another pain point.

Recognising the need for a more efficient solution, Shyam and Shankar, who are twin brothers, decided to launch software products—under their company BanyanBoard—offering high-quality sports analytics and real-time graphics in an accessible and affordable manner.

From R&D to sports tech

Prior to starting up, Shankar finished his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign after a bachelor’s degree in materials science from IIT Madras. Shyam did his PhD from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities after a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Madras.

Shankar went on to become an award-winning researcher at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York. He was chosen for GE’s accelerated leadership programme, when he decided to relocate back to India. He donned a number of roles within GE, before leading a cutting-edge AI research team at Aditya Birla.

Shyam too worked at the GE Global Research Center for a few years before moving into program and technical management roles. He continued in the energy sector, leading the AI team of a Silicon Valley energy storage startup before relocating to India.

The brothers founded BanyanBoard in 2021 as a company focused on R&D in the industrial and edtech markets. The turning point for the company came in 2023 during the Squash World Cup in Chennai when the duo provided real-time graphics and data collection services.

Their experience during the tournament, combined with mentorship from experts in sports analysis and management, guided them towards sports technology.

“We ourselves are sports buffs having played and led competitive teams in different sports. The trigger factor was some outside-the-box thinking, with Shankar literally knocking on the doors of sports academies and experts to get feedback on whether our tools could help coaches and players,” explains Shyam.

Today, Bengaluru-based BanyanBoard is a six-member team building innovative software products for the sports industry, covering sports analysis and broadcast graphics.

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What BanyanBoard offers

The company’s flagship product is SPAN (SPorts Analysis)—a cloud-based software platform designed to streamline sports analysis.

The SaaS solution enables efficient data collection and video analysis. Its features include ‘video tagging’ that allows users to mark and analyse key moments in sports footage. Its AI-driven insights help athletes and coaches identify opportunities for performance improvements.

SPAN is a bit like an SAP ERP software, which can be configured to do a host of things, explains Shyam.

SPAN can be used to create sports-specific data collection templates, coding windows, user interfaces, scoring recipes, charts, and dashboards. These capabilities help academies and teams establish a comprehensive analysis practice—similar to how one establishes an ERP practice.

This is different from an app that works only for one sport and has everything pre-configured just for that sport, says Shyam. On the contrary, the SPAN software is sport-agnostic and can be used for most team games and racquet sports, he adds.

Currently, SPAN is used commercially to analyse football, hockey, badminton and squash footage.

The software is used by training academies, sports leagues, competitive teams, national federations, and individual athletes. It is sold to businesses typically and given free to budding analysts for the purpose of learning.

While developing SPAN, BanyanBoard recognised the market need for real-time data visualisation in sports broadcasting. This led to the creation of the EvoFX graphics platform.

The platform allows graphics and real-time data to be merged and used as livestream graphics. The data can come from scoring applications, Google Sheets, sports data APIs, or can be manually typed in by operators.

EvoFX is entirely browser-based, which allows multiple operators to control the graphics—this is important in real-time applications where speed is key. Operators can sit remotely and work from home, thus saving travel costs for event organisers.

To cater to smaller broadcasters and streamers, BanyanBoard has introduced EZGrafix, a simplified, plug-and-play version of EvoFX. The pay-as-you-go tool enables independent producers and sports streamers to enhance their live sports streams with professional-quality graphics.

EZGrafix comes with a variety of pre-built templates with designs and themes needed by sports streamers.

The startup also offers EZSquash, an analysis-as-a-service offering for squash players.

“We also bring in new capabilities like live tagging and scoring matches from mobile phones, live embeddable match centres, as well as completely custom charts and dashboards, which let the analysis department choose how they want to visualise player performance,” says Shankar.

Business model and growth

BanyanBoard’s technology solutions are increasingly being adopted for live data collection, broadcast graphics, and AI-driven sports analysis, across cricket, kabaddi, football, field hockey, squash, table tennis, swimming and pickleball.

SPAN and EvoFX follow a B2B model, serving organisations in need of advanced sports analytics and broadcast solutions. EZGrafix follows a B2C model, targeting independent sports streamers and small-scale broadcasters.

BanyanBoard’s clients include Khelo India, FC Madras (one of the top-5 football academies in India), Squash Rackets Federation of India, Yuva Kabaddi Series (one of the largest kabaddi leagues in India after Pro Kabaddi League), India TV’s IPL show on YouTube. The startup also works with national and international level athletes.

“We have been fortunate to have been mentored by many of our clients. In many cases, we consider them as partners more than clients. Often our engagement extends beyond the scope of providing software, helping clients with related requirements,” says Shankar.

Citing an example to illustrate the impact BanyanBoard’s solution can create, he says, “When we replaced a world-leading solution at a football/soccer academy, we probably saved them more than 50% on the annual cost of analysis software… Our estimate is we are 40-50% cheaper in general in both sports analysis and broadcasting spaces.”

Currently, the bootstrapped company generates revenue primarily from Indian clients. It competes with global players such as Hudl, Nacsport, Spiideo, and Once Sport in the sports analysis space, and players like Vizrt, Ross, NewblueFX, and Singular.live in broadcast graphics. Zero Density and Girrafic are its competition in the AI-driven graphics and augmented reality space.

Having established its product-market fit, BanyanBoard is now scaling up to serve larger sporting events.

With increasing interest from international markets, the startup is keen to expand its global presence.