4 companies to watch in 2026

From Prevention to Participation: The Next Era of Sports Innovation

4 companies to watch in 2026

Modern sport is no longer defined by what happens only on the pitch. It is shaped by availability of players, depth of fan connection, intelligence of venues, and the ability to turn attention into measurable value. Clubs are losing seasons to injuries that could have been prevented. Fans are more engaged than ever, yet harder to retain. Sponsors demand proof of impact, not just exposure. And rights holders are under pressure to monetize every touchpoint across physical and digital environments.

This new reality is forcing sports organizations to rethink how they protect performance, engage audiences, and unlock revenue. The following four companies represent this shift in action. From predictive injury prevention and gamified fandom to intelligent venues and next-generation sponsorship experiences, Be-Healthy.AI, Clout, Firebolt, and CINCO are each addressing a critical pressure point in the modern sports ecosystem with solutions built for measurable impact.

Together, they offer a glimpse into how the future of sport is being rebuilt: proactive rather than reactive, data-led rather than assumption-driven, and designed to create value for players, fans, sponsors, and rights holders alike.

Be-Healthy.AI – Promises 75% Prediction Accuracy

Be-Healthy.AI, a new sports-tech AI company, today announced the launch of its predictive injury prevention platform, designed to combat the estimated €732 million lost by European football clubs in the 2023/24 season due to player injuries. The platform uses state-of-the-art predictive AI to anticipate injury risk up to a week in advance with better than 75% accuracy, marking a paradigm shift from treating injuries to proactively preventing them.

The Be-Healthy.AI solution uses publicly available sports data to detect the likelihood of elite athletes experiencing a soft tissue injury within a 7-day window. The platform alerts medical teams, allowing proactive adjustment of training loads, and supports athletes before an issue arises. This proactive system offers massive returns on investment: preventing just one ACL injury can save a club between €5 million and €10 million.

How sports brands can benefit:

• Football injuries cost Europe’s top clubs hundreds of millions every year in salaries paid to unavailable players, replacements, and medical treatments.
• Clubs are significantly disadvantaged during periods when star performers are benched, leading to lost championships and destroyed seasons.
• Be-Healthy.AI enables teams to monitor risk, plan training, and communicate recommendations quickly to athletes.
• This is a win-win as players remain on the pitch, and teams continue to field their best squad.

Why it matters: In elite performance, decisions that avoid injury compound into major competitive advantage. BeHealthy.AI turns injury prevention into a measurable, optimized, and proactive system, and has the potential to save clubs on the huge amounts of money, and advantage, currently lost to player injury.

Clout (Play Clout) | Turn your Fandom into Rewards

Clout gamifies fandom by turning engagement into real rewards. Fans compete, earn XP, and redeem marketplace prizes while connecting with the teams, brands, and creators they love most. Built for fans and powered by community, Clout’s mission is to reward attention and redefine participation in the creator and sports ecosystem.

They have worked with industry leading brands and platforms including Lyrical Lemonade, FaZe Esports FocusFuel, Final Boss, and GRID to allow fans to have the most rewarding experience possible while watching their favorite content, and for brands to interact with their communities through gamification and loyalty rewards. The prime focus is to make the fans win, the brands win, and the sponsors win, to prove out a 360 degree ecosystem on fan engagement.

How sports brands can benefit:

• Deepens fan engagement for brands who want to consistently launch new products and scale their brand loyalty program
• Incentivizes fan viewership through gamification tools
• Creates new revenue streams for brands and teams to successfully monetize fan engagement
• Elevates the fan experience while while making sure fan value exceeds fan cost

Why it matters: Clout exists to give fans more value than they give, more connection, more reward, and more belonging. As fandom evolves into a culture of analysis, remixing, and investment, Clout champions that passion and creativity. By gamifying cultural moments, we create a new way for fans to stay engaged, rewarded, and part of the experience.

Firebolt | Turning Fan Environments Into Measurable ROI

For more than two decades, Firebolt has helped global brands improve marketing performance and drive incremental revenue through smarter real-world activation. Over the past five years, we have expanded our digital capabilities to deliver comprehensive measurement, insights, and optimization within the sports environment. Our proprietary platforms are enterprise-ready and built to deliver commercial results.

How sports brands can benefit:

• Illuminated Signage and Digital POSM – Premium LED and digital display systems that command attention at key decision points. Built for global compliance (Ecovadis Gold, ISO 14001:2015) and consistent execution across large venue networks. This increases brand/sponsor visibility as well as point-of-sale conversion.
• Glimpse AI and Analytics – Operational intelligence from existing CCTV and proprietary sensors that reveal occupancy, queue flow, dwell time, and conversion. This improves throughput, reduces lost sales, and increases revenue per square foot.
• Fan Engagement Technology – Compliant first-party data capture and survey insights delivered via kiosks, brand ambassadors, or the consumer’s mobile device via QR code. This strengthens direct relationships with consumers and enhances remarketing value for partners.

Why it matters: Firebolt delivers elevated signage and interaction points that drive conversion and sponsor impact, combines venue intelligence to improve staffing, stock availability, and the fan experience, and connects data to power loyalty and deliver measurable downstream value.

Cinco | AI Experience Room: The Next Generation of Sports Sponsorship

Click here for more information: AI Experience Room

The AI Experience Room is a fully branded, web-based interactive environment that lets fans explore teams, athletes, merchandise, and sponsor products through real-time conversational AI, immersive 3D, rich content, and personalized storytelling. Accessible instantly through a link or QR code, with no app required. For rights holders, it’s a plug-and-play digital asset that they can sell as premium sponsorship inventory, and for sponsors, it’s a next-generation marketing & sponsorship asset that they can activate across any channel.

What it does

• Turns traditional sponsorship visibility into measurable engagement, consideration, and conversion, offering adaptive AI-guided conversations that tailor content to each fan.
• Integrates easily into broadcast, in-venue, social, digital campaigns, retail, ticketing, and partner activations.
• Captures advanced first-party data, including sentiment, intent, friction points, and content performance.
• Drives direct revenue through ticketing, merchandise, memberships, partner commerce, and lead capture.

How Rights Holders and Brands Benefit

• Rights holders gain a new monetizable digital asset that is always on and designed to increase sponsorship value. It deepens fan journeys, extends partner visibility beyond game day, and strengthens renewal arguments with transparent KPIs.

• Sponsors receive a performance-driven, revenue-generating marketing & sponsorship platform that moves fans from interest to action. Interactions become personalized, trackable, and tied to clear commercial outcomes.

Why it matters: CINCO delivers 15–20% higher sponsorship value through deeper, personalized engagement, drives 3–5× more fan interaction than static digital content, strengthens first-party data capture by 30–60% for smarter targeting and reporting, enables direct and trackable conversion to commerce and ticketing, reinforces renewal discussions with transparent KPIs tied to sentiment, intent, and performance, and unlocks new incremental revenue by positioning the AI Experience Room as a premium, scalable asset built for measurable commercial impact.

Conclusion

What connects these four companies is not just technology, but intent. Each one tackles a structural inefficiency that has quietly cost the sports industry hundreds of millions in lost performance, lost engagement, or unrealized commercial value. Be-Healthy.AI focuses on keeping elite athletes on the pitch. Clout turns fandom into a living, rewarding ecosystem. Firebolt transforms physical venues into data-driven revenue engines. CINCO redefines sponsorship as an interactive, measurable, and scalable digital asset.

Taken together, they signal a broader shift underway in sport: from exposure to outcomes, from intuition to intelligence, and from isolated moments to continuous value creation. As competition intensifies on and off the field, the organizations that win will be those that adopt solutions designed for prevention, participation, insight, and ROI.

This is not the future of sports innovation as a concept. It is already happening.