Accelerate Ventures, a new venture capital fund focusing on the sports and sports technology markets, has unveiled three significant investments since the start of 2025.
Accelerate, which aims to build a portfolio of investments at the intersection of sport and technology, has invested in performance-tracking data firm PlayerData, social betting brand Betmate, and (most recently) Camb.AI, an AI translation tool that has previously been used by sporting properties such as North America’s Major League Soccer and the Eurovision Sport streaming platform.
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Lucas Danson, chief executive at Accelerate Ventures, has commented: “We’re thrilled to be working with such great companies, and we look forward to finding the next investments that will revolutionize the sports ecosystem.”
All three investments, Accelerate feel, show the company’s ambition to position itself as a leading sports investment fund.
The company, based in London, launched early year and has been “taking a fresh and unconventional approach to venture capital” as its stated ambition.
Nick Ford, the group’s strategy director, also commented: “Our 3 initial portfolio companies all have fantastic teams behind them, and we can’t wait to help them grow over the coming years.”
For PlayerData, Accelerate has invested through a pre-Series A bridge round.
That firm provides GPS sports tracking data to the mass market, through hardware, accessories, and software, to provide best-in-class data to teams and players at an affordable price.
Betmate, meanwhile, was launched in 2020 as a social betting site that offers a range of fantasy-style games to players – these change from week to week.
The Accelerate investment – indeed, Accelerate led Betmate’s Series A fundraising round – came after the betting brand launched a B2B arm entitled Engage Games.
That platform has been created to provide games for companies to want to engage more closely with their target audience.
Overall, the Series A round raised £1.6 million ($1.97 million) for Betmate, based in Liverpool.
For the firm’s investment into Camb.AI, unveiled this week, Accelerate has invested, again, as part of a pre-Series A bridge round.
Camb.AI provides the ability for speech-to-speech to be translated in close to real-time, using advanced AI and machine learning tools to dub and translate video and audio.
This includes live sporting broadcasts – Accelerate feels the technical capabilities available will end up revolutionizing sports broadcasting, and that eventually it will mean broadcasters can air coverage in more than one language simultaneously.
In terms of its sporting experience, Camb.AI has worked with both MLS and the Eurovision Sport over-the-top streaming platform.
The latter tie-up saw Eurovision Sport (an arm of the European Broadcasting Union) test out live, AI-generated, translated commentary, at the World Athletics Under20 Championships in August last year.
Through Camb.AI’s work with that platform, all the action from that event was available to fans in English, French, and Portuguese.
MLS used Camb.AI’s services to achieve the same outcome at a game in the MLS Next Pro developmental series last April, meanwhile.
Commentary of that game, through the AI technology, was made available in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
These deals have all been added to the existing high-level partnerships Accelerate Ventures has in place with the hugely successful Wigan Warriors rugby league team, and with the Wigan Athletic soccer club, out of northern England.
Those tie-ups involve Accelerate using its know-how to enhance the technological capabilities of both organizations.
