When Andy Roddick suggests something, Lindsay Davenport listens. And now SwingVision has two high-profile investors in the simple service that uses a single iPhone to provide match video and highlights, stats and real-time line calling.

“When Andy talks, I tend to listen a little more,” Davenport tells me. “He was telling me about the features.” It was that range of features that prompted Davenport to join Roddick, Alison Riske, Rohan Bopanna and James Blake from the tennis world and a mix of business folks as investors in SwingVision, which announced a $6 million Series A financing round as it plans to build out tournament-grade officiating and remote coaching.

Founded in 2019 by Tesla
TSLA
veteran Swupnil Sahai and Richard Hsu, SwingVision uses an AI-powered app to turn video captured from a users’ iPhone or iPad camera into stats, highlights and officiating. While the original plan kicked off as a Strava for tennis, a way for recreational players to track stats and shots, Sahai, now CEO, tells me that the video portion of the app quickly became the most popular element.

That helped draw Davenport into the fold. With four children, Davenport says her and her husband are often pulled away from being at their son’s matches—he’s a high-level junior player—and SwingVision giving access to watch matches proved a popular entry point. From there, she realized the coaching importance of watching back matches in an app that condensed a two-hour event into an action-only 20 minutes while adding analytics. The detail of the app even allows players to pull out specific scenarios, such as all break points from a match.

As a player who won three major titles and spent 98 weeks as the World No. 1, Davenport says that when she left the tour in 2008 tennis was way behind in analytics and statistical data. While that piece has grown in the professional game, she wants to see it become more normalized for other levels. “With SwingVision it evens the playing field for everybody,” she says. “You are able to get the data if you want.”

Now the coach of the United States’ Billie Jean King Cup team, Davenport says she hopes to use SwingVision to help track the analytics and data of all the women in the mix for the U.S. team. “This is an amazing avenue to keep my eye on them and create my own chartbook on what works and what isn’t working and what I want to work on when I get to be with those players on the court,” she says. “I was a visual learner, so I think this will be a great tool for me.”

SwingVision has partnered with more than 100 Division I college tennis teams, from Harvard to Stanford and Florida to TCU. Sahai says college coaches use the service to break down matches into consumable video chunks that players watch on their way home.

The stats and the video have grown to allow streaming of live matches. Rarely are junior tournaments streamed, unlike in team sports. “It gives us a way to watch [her son] play and gives him a way to watch him play, see what went right and what went wrong,” Davenport says. “We started getting into it with him and now he’s working on drills and placement stuff, it is taking him to a whole other level than my husband I expected.”

The coaching aspect will become a more regular part of SwingVision in the future, with Sahai planning to add a function in the subscription-based format that allows players to submit a match to a coach in the system who then provides feedback. The remote coaching is enabled by the app’s ability to quickly render video and highlights.

Improved AI ball tracking is enabling a third key element of the app to offer a real growth point: line calling. Players can even challenge calls from their watch. “We’ve come up with our patented solution for single-camera object tracking,” Sahai says. “It can settle a lot of disputes on the court.”

With the AI algorithm processing video in real time at 60 frames per second, double that of the human eye and faster than self-driving cars, the app’s high frame rate provides powerful accuracy. “We are able to see both sides of the court more accurately than the players,” Sahai says.

He believes the next step for SwingVision is to provide official line calling at junior or college tournaments by placing an iPad on each court (the app works best when the device is hung from behind the baseline as high on the fence as possible). “Line calling is a major issue at the amateur level,” Sahai says. “There is a big opportunity there to solve that problem once and for all.”

Davenport says she hopes SwingVision can help the sport become fairer. “I’ve been impressed with all the technology and all the things they are trying to do,” she says. “I am happy to help change for the better however I can.”

Davenport, who has started investing in companies in the past five years, says she only gets involved in companies she believes in and knows the people around it. “It is fun to get behind something that is going to be awesome with great people and is a great product,” she says. “I have even more of an interest in SwingVision because it is my sport.”

Working with top players and key organizations such as Tennis Australia and the USTA has given both credibility and access for Sahai, something he values as he looks to grow both in tennis and other sports.

“We’re not endorsers of it, we are believers in it and ultimately investors in it,” Davenport says. “There are a lot of amazing people in the sport who are behind SwingVision to get it more successful than it already is.”