Startup Founder Interview: How Badass Studios Is Reinventing Sports Entertainment

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First, the company’s mission is succinctly stated as “Live events become playable.” This highlights the unique value proposition of the startup.

The growing demand for audience participation is explained. While viewers now want to be more engaged, live events produce vast amounts of data. Technologies like Unreal Engine and cloud computing can now turn this data into interactive experiences.

The team’s exceptional mix of backgrounds in gaming, film, broadcast, live events, virtual production and emerging tech is emphasized. This interdisciplinary expertise is crucial because the challenge lies outside the traditional boundaries of any single industry. The team’s ability to smoothly combine these diverse skill sets is vital for tackling this complex problem.

The founder expresses deep gratitude for their talented, creative, and resilient team. Their passion for building innovative products under pressure in live international sports is contagious. They view Badass Studios as a new form of storytelling where the audience is no longer passive but can actively participate.

Success is measured through commercial validation, repeat business, and technology performance under real-world conditions. The ultimate metric is whether they deliver a usable product that customers genuinely want to buy again.

Badass Studios offers live, real-time digital twins for sports properties. Their key differentiators are delivering this live experience and providing a platform with multiple use cases. The same environment can power broadcast graphics, AR, simulators, games, virtual production, and fan experiences, rather than fragmented activations.

The company's traction includes creating a live digital twin of an international race that connected with real-time on-water action. This platform powered broadcast visuals, AR, simulation, and LiveGP, where players race against the actual pilots. The technology's resilience in live sport environments proves the concept of live events becoming playable.

For the next year, growth will focus on turning successful event projects into long-term platform relationships. They plan to expand to other sports, such as motorsport, and develop LiveGP, a model for audience competition during live events. The ultimate growth engine is live, playable sport delivered through various channels.

Their first paying customer was the UIM E1 World Championship, an all-electric raceboat championship. The project started with a real-time digital twin of the race environment, connecting live data to Unreal Engine for immersive broadcast and AR experiences. This proved both founding ideas: live data can turn spectators into participants, and a unified platform can create multiple experiences.

They anticipate tripling revenue as they move toward multi-event agreements, recurring platform revenue, and partnerships that scale across entire seasons.

The biggest threat is not competition but the inertia of traditional, less innovative approaches. Live entertainment includes many stakeholders, which can lead to complacency. Technical risks also exist, given the complexity of managing live systems.