Superstat, a Melbourne sports-tech startup, has raised A$3.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Blackbird to bring elite-grade performance analytics to sports that have never had it. The raise follows the Startmate S26 accelerator and includes angel backing from Blinq's Jarrod Webb and Mindset Health's Alex and Chris Naoumidis. Blackbird partner Niki Scevak led the deal.

The company's computer vision platform turns raw match footage into structured data automatically, including player stats, event timelines and performance patterns. Work that once ate a full weekend of manual video coding, or was never done at all, now runs automatically. Superstat started with basketball but is built to scale to any team sport.

Founded by Cordelia King, Kai Bloomfield (a former AFL data analyst) and Sam Hung, the startup has grown to more than 5,000 active users and ships new features almost daily based on coach feedback.

Next stop is Austin, Texas, where US youth-sport participation dwarfs Australia's and the University of Texas offers a deep technical talent pool. The team is already building models for NFL, volleyball, soccer and baseball, and is hiring locally.