A British startup has embedded 156 sensor plates beneath 60 metres of track at Cardiff’s National Indoor Athletics Centre, marking the opening shot of an 18-month pilot programme.
The technology, built by Feldspar and designed in partnership with the Cambridge Design Collective, captures horizontal, vertical and lateral force data alongside centre pressure in real time.
The Cardiff deployment is the centrepiece of a seed fundraising push, with the company in active talks to secure between £5.5m and £6m from strategic backers.
Feldspar describes its sensor-plate system as the world’s first modular platform for continuous, real-time force measurement across sports surfaces, with potential for recurring subscription revenues.
Founder Alvina Chen, an athlete turned entrepreneur whose family has bankrolled the company through its first three years, says the ambition is to change what sport is built on, not just how it is played.
“We’ve seen a lot of innovations in running shoes and training methods and so on but I haven’t seen anything that changes the surface itself,” Chen said.
The company’s two products work in tandem: a performance-enhancing track layer sits above the cloud-connected sensor plates, feeding coaches and athletes with biomechanical insights that can also be converted into broadcast-ready content.
The team behind the venture carries considerable weight, drawing on ex-GB sprinter Darren Campbell alongside senior figures from the Premier League, the London Marathon, SailGP and Formula E.
Executive director Tim Godfrey, who has held roles at SailGP, Formula E and triathlon’s PTO, argues the company has crossed a threshold that others have not reached: “Nobody has been able to solve this particular problem of getting this level of biomechanical force data at scale. People do it already, but in a single force plate. No one’s done it to the scale we’ve done before. That’s the technological innovation.”
Feldspar is prioritising sports organisations as its first investors, believing they can shape how the products evolve, with institutional capital expected to follow at Series A and Series B stages.
Court-based sports have already registered interest, and Godfrey has pointed to a far larger prize in football, raising the prospect of sensors running beneath an entire full-size pitch.
“So you could imagine the new Manchester United football stadium that’s being built, our sensors all being connected underneath that,” Godfrey said, adding: “Now, that’s quite blue sky thinking, but it’s 100 per cent achievable.”
Cost remains the principal obstacle to full-scale athletics track deployment, with current pricing making a complete eight-lane, 400-metre installation impractical without further manufacturing and supply chain development.
The company has set 2036 as its target for making full stadium adoption financially viable, aligning that milestone explicitly with the ambition of embedding the technology inside the Olympic Games.