SXSW Startups: Miro
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 27, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Sports and Performance Data, which will pitch at 12:30 pm Sunday, March 10, Miro Human Body AI is an AI and computer vision technology startup focused on amateur sports and fitness. Miro’s proprietary AI can identify athletes, extract brand preferences and unlock one-of-a-kind insights from event photos and videos. Powering the experience for more than 400 events globally, Miro’s AI, which is based in Hong Kong, is a rich source of data for event professionals, sponsors and brands. Since launching in April 2017, Miro has indexed and analyzed over eight million bodies in motion.
What are your goals for Miro in 2019?
This is going to be an incredible year across many fronts. Having provided instant athlete ID as a white-labeled product for the last few years, SXSW is a bit of a coming out party for Miro’s broader business capabilities within the United States. We look to drive further awareness for our insights and products and to align ourselves with even more of the sports industry’s innovative brands and retailers. In addition, we are looking to quickly increase our coverage of events across the globe and to transition our injury prevention analysis into our suite of commercial products.
Miro maintains the technology for things such as shoe and headphone analysis, which has major implications for the ease with which companies are able to build custom audiences. What does access to this information look like for interested brands?
Miro insights are intended to overhaul the way in which brands learn about consumers, with the ability to analyze what they actually use in the real-world. Our data approach has been architected with brands and retailers in mind, providing an easy-to-use dashboard that enables marketers to filter and segment audiences across a number of variables for export. For larger clients, our structured database is set up to be accessed directly via API.
Your company identifies as an “under the hood” provider. How is this a relevant differentiation from other companies in your field?
It is less about differentiation and more about how Miro sees its role within the space. Millions of athletes participate in events or purchase a brand that they have an affinity for. Our goal is to enable our partners to make everything more memorable or more relevant. We collect the amazing photos and video that our partners are already taking, and turn them into something of greater value to all parties involved in the value chain (instant photos, brand preferences, runner insights, etc.). We take something that is extremely complex “under the hood” and produce something that is frictionless for all parties involved.
70 percent of runners experience an injury over a 12-month period. Miro is currently developing the technology to identify such injuries and athletes’ potential need for physical therapy in order to prevent long term damage. What will this software look like?
Everyone grows up knowing how to run, it’s intuitive, few people are ever coached on proper form. Miro is working with healthcare professionals to see if we can arm runners with some insight into their form and make recommendations on how to improve it. This would be done by simply analyzing the photos and video that we already receive from events. How and where the information will be presented to the runner is still being finalized, it will definitely be done in a way that enables our industry partners to complement their existing offerings.
How has your team’s work and athletic experience informed Miro’s development?
While not everyone on the team is a world class runner, a passion for sports is only second to the team’s interest in solving complex technology problems. Miro’s founders have been building computer vision products that have touched the lives of billions of people many times over. Transferring this knowledge to Miro, the team approaches the business with a focus on developing products that can scale, add immense business value, and proactively address privacy concerns.
Would you tell us a little about your partnerships and how they further Miro’s mission?
Our partners own the complex challenges that Miro is tackling. We continue to align ourselves with event organizers, retailers, and brands who are the real disruptors in their industries. We provide a set of tools that give them a competitive advantage and, in return, we receive valuable feedback that enables Miro to enhance our tools with features that provide even greater value to the industry.
What trend is your team most excited about?
It is hard not to be impressed with the automation of vehicles. How mind blowing is it to envision a future when we are describing to our grandkids a world where humans were able to recklessly take control of a car?
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
The biggest lesson we’ve learned is the value of being comfortable not getting it right the first time. Building a business is messy, it takes trying out dozens of ideas before one works. To have a chance of success, moving fast and breaking things seems to be the way to go.
Everything is more difficult than you think it will be. You start out thinking you have an element of control and very quickly realize that you don’t.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
