Bolt6 was co-founded by a team including four former Hawk-Eye Innovations executives looking to speed up development and investment into optical tracking technology.
“There were ideas we wanted to move on and make happen,” said one of those co-founders, James Japhet, Bolt6’s chief commercial officer. “Unfortunately, we didn’t feel that could happen in the Sony building.”
Five years in, Bolt6 has built a fully cloud-based architecture that is helping major sports properties and broadcasters better officiate competitions and leverage data into storytelling elements.
In tennis, its live electronic line-calling solution is one of four vendors certified for elite competition by the International Tennis Federation, and last year was rolled out across dozens of ATP and WTA Tour tournaments worldwide. It also is used by the Australian Open, for which Bolt6 annually spearheads innovations such as, in 2026, net-affixed lights that signaled “out” calls and a new camera system called Mojo that enables the stitching together of several vantage points into an immersive tracking shot.
“They’ve been super nimble with us in terms of spinning up new products and allowing us to put them out to the world,” said Machar Reid, director of innovation at Tennis Australia (a Bolt6 investor). “The thing we noticed the most is the speed with which they’re trying to challenge the status quo.”
To that point, Bolt6’s sports partnerships run the gamut of use cases. It is powering the United Football League’s TrU Line ball placement system and calibrating cameras used by the PGA Tour (for its drone tracer), MLB (for the augmented-reality strike zone in its Umpire PitchTrack feature) and America’s Cup sailing competition (for helicopter camera feeds over which data-driven broadcast graphics are laid), among other deployments. It also has a video platform that gives its clients access to the reams of footage it captures on demand.
Japhet said the company’s focus on three core pillars — optical tracking, video management and broadcast camera calibration — will continue. “We enjoy looking at different ways stories can be told,” he said.
Bolt6
FOUNDED: 2021
HQ: London
EMPLOYEES: 105
KEY EXECUTIVES: Steve Carter, CEO; Ed Hawke, CTO; Luke Dodd, CIO; James Japhet, CCO
KEY PARTNERS: America’s Cup, ATP Tour, WTA Tour, Tennis Australia, Volleyball World, MLV, NASCAR, UFL, PGA Tour, LIV Golf, Fox Sports, ESPN, CBS, NBC and MLB
