Sports Video Tech Company Trace Raises $47 Million Series C Round, Valued At $190 Million

Trace, a sports video technology company focused on making personalized highlights of youth athletes, has raised $47 million in a Series C round.

The funding gave Trace a $190 million post-money valuation, five times higher than following its previous round, according to David Lokshin, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.

Pelion Venture Partners, a Salt Lake City, Utah, venture capital firm, led the Series C funding. Jeff Kearl, a Pelion managing partner since 2019 and co-founder of the Stance apparel brand, joined Trace’s board of directors in conjunction with Pelion’s investment. Kearl has been friends with and a mentor to Lokshin for several years, and he had invested in the company in its early days as an angel investor.

Lakestar, a Zurich, Switzerland, VC firm, Toba Capital, a Newport Beach, Calif., VC firm and NextGen VP, a Baltimore VC firm, also participated in the round. All told, Trace has raised $65.2 million in funding, including a $15 million Series B round in late 2019.

Trace sells subscriptions consisting of its proprietary wide-angle cameras, artificial intelligence and GPS sensors technology primarily to youth soccer clubs across the United States. The clubs install the cameras at their games, and Trace’s cameras record the games and automatically edit and personalize the videos for each player.

For instance, the videos show every time a player touched or kicked the ball during a game, which allows parents not to have to wade through the entire game and edit the film themselves. The videos are then sent via email to the players and/or their parents, who can share them with family members, college coaches and others.

“We deliver (videos) just of your kids to you, so you don’t have to watch the full game, you don’t have to spend any time editing, you don’t have to spend any time recording,” David Lokshin said. “You just get to see your kids.”

As of now, more than 1,000 soccer clubs use Trace, and each of the clubs has several or even dozens of teams. Trace claims more than 1.4 million athletes have access to its cameras and technology. The company last month announced it had signed a two-year partnership with Club Champions League, which serves more than 100,000 youth soccer players in nine states and Washington, D.C.

Earlier this year, Trace began selling its product to baseball and softball clubs, too. The company plans on using proceeds of the Series C round to grow its soccer, baseball and softball verticals and expand its staff from about 100 currently to 160 to 170 employees by the fall.

Lokshin claims Trace generated more than $10 million in revenue last year, and he expects revenue will triple this year. That is much higher than Lokshin anticipated in 2010 when he and his father, Anatole Lokshin, began the company as a side project. At the time, the company was known as AlpineReplay, David Lokshin was a foreign exchange options trader at Barclays Capital and Anatole had recently retired as chief technology officer at Magellan Navigation, Inc., which made the world’s first commercial GPS receiver in 1989.

AlpineReplay initially focused on action sports, and in 2014 the company raised more than $160,000 through a Kickstarter campaign for what became the Trace device. The Lokshins marketed Trace to surfers, skiiers, snowboarders and other action sports competitors.

“We got a ton of traction (in action sports),” David Lokshin said. “People absolutely loved the product. They still email today asking if we can continue to revive the past, but the market was just too small. We realized while the idea was powerful, we needed to find a larger market and that’s when we went into team sports.”

Since 2018, Trace has focused exclusively on team youth sports because that is a large market with millions of potential customers and parents love to capture videos of their children playing. Trace does not sell subscriptions to professional, semi-professional or college teams.

“We feel like the company now has really found its product-market fit,” said Kearl, general partner of Pelion Venture Partners, Trace’s lead investor in the Series C round. “Customers love it, and they’re using it. We not only have the soccer use case, but it’s exploding in baseball and softball, and we think there’s dozens of other greater use cases in sports as well as lifestyle.”

While Lokshin noted Trace will primarily focus on youth sports for the foreseeable future, he envisions a time when Trace cameras are positioned at theme parks and other places where parents currently take hours of videos of their children.

“We think that world (where people are taking videos themselves) is coming to an end and you’ll just get content pushed to you,” David Lokshin said. “The highlights of your kids when they’re at a concert or at Disneyland or you’re at a resort or they’re playing sports, you’ll get all that content pushed to you. You’ll be able to share it, download it, do whatever you want with it. But you won’t be taking out your phone. It will be all of this content captured by these cameras that are all over the world in your daily life, and Trace will be the keeper and creator of memories.”