How the Australian Open became a tech incubator

Every year, Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley issues a challenge to his team that would make most executives—and their teams—break into a cold sweat: Reinvent 50% of the Australian Open. Not subtle changes or a few tweaks. Half of everything, so no two tournaments are ever the same.

Today, to help satisfy Tiley’s mandate, the event has evolved into a three-pronged innovation machine. There’s an in-house R&D lab that’s been developing analytics, broadcast, and fan engagement advancements for more than 15 years, alongside a startup accelerator that’s piloted 40 companies, and a $40 million VC fund to capitalize those startups.

“The 50% innovation challenge creates something most large organizations struggle to cultivate: permission to fail,” says Machar Reid, director of innovation and AO Ventures general partner.”

It’s working. The 2025 Australian Open set attendance records with 1,218,831 fans through the gates over three weeks, breaking the previous year’s mark by more than 100,000. It attracted 1.9 billion global viewers, drew 2.3 billion social impressions, and generated $565.8 million for host city Melbourne’s economy. And this year’s tournament, which rolls into its final rounds this weekend, is poised to be another record-setter.

Inside Tennis Australia’s tech workshop

It all started with AO Labs, Tennis Australia’s research and development arm. This is the internal division that builds the broadcast and fan engagement technologies that have transformed how people watch tennis.

Last year’s breakout was AO Animated, which uses skeletal tracking to turn live matches into Nintendo Wii-style cartoons. The technology tracks 29 points on each player’s body at 50 frames per second, creating real-time avatars that move exactly as the players do. The feed went viral in 2025, drawing nearly 1 million viewers in the first four days alone.

The technology is fun. But it also solves a real problem. Tennis Australia took over its own broadcast production in 2015—one of only two Grand Slam tournaments to control its own broadcast (the US Open only recently started moving in this direction). Other Grand Slams turn broadcast production over to networks like ESPN or TNT Sports. Tennis Australia maintains creative control, then licenses that production to broadcast partners including ESPN in the U.S. and Channel 9 in Australia.

But those licensing agreements create restrictions. The AO Animated stream functions as a legal work-around. Since it’s generated from tracking biometric data rather than relying on video footage, it doesn’t violate exclusivity agreements. Viewers without broadcast subscriptions could clip highlights and share them.

Fans loved it. Players found it hilarious. By week two of last year’s tournament, Tennis Australia was providing the feed to three broadcast partners, and they’ve brought it back again for 2026.

AO Animated is among the latest in a series of experiments. But even AO Labs isn’t enough to satisfy Tiley’s 50% mandate. To achieve that, the team knew it had to tap external resources.

Turning Melbourne Park into a tech incubator

In 2022, Tennis Australia launched AO Startups. The goal: identify early-stage companies with technology Tennis Australia could eventually implement, giving both sides a chance to test product-market fit at one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

“Rather than trying to be really narrow with a problem statement, we stay purposefully broad,” says Reid. “There are occasions where we don’t know what we don’t know.”

The 2025 cohort included 12 companies—the largest since inception—spanning digital ticketing platforms, AI-powered personalized menus for dietary needs, automated screening checks, production project management software, and wearable resistance suits for athlete training.

The selection process is rigorous, but fast. Startups apply through aostartups.ausopen.com, with applications opening periodically throughout the year and Tennis Australia announcing new cohorts in the lead-up to each Australian Open. Applicants are evaluated on team quality, market opportunity, ambition level, and mutual impact potential. Those accepted get access to Tennis Australia executives, pilots across the organization’s summer events, and pathways to becoming official suppliers.

Each pilot is customized based on the company’s stage and technology. Some test products still in development. Others run full-scale deployments. Some pilots test across Tennis Australia’s entire three-week summer series—the United Cup in Sydney and Perth, Brisbane International, and Adelaide International—with select pilots deployed at the Australian Open itself. The customized trials give founders real-world feedback at scale while giving Tennis Australia confidence that the systems work under pressure—which is critical, given that they’re not just piloting tools that enhance the broadcast and fan experience, but technology that can impact the matches themselves.

Six engineers vs. one monopoly

In 2021, four engineers walked away from Hawkeye, the company that had dominated electronic line calling in tennis for two decades. They teamed up with two others and founded Bolt6 specifically to build something better—a cloud-first system that could do things Hawkeye’s legacy architecture couldn’t.

Tennis Australia had been a Hawkeye client for 17 years. When Bolt6 approached the team about piloting new technology through AO Startups, Reid saw opportunity—and a lot of risk.

“[Line calling] is our highest-risk technology,” Reid says. “If that does not work, we’re in trouble, because it’s calling lines for the playing group. It’s not like we have lines people waiting on standby to jump in if the technology goes down.”

So Tennis Australia methodically de-risked it, inviting Bolt6 to join AO Startups. At the 2023 Australian Open, Bolt6 ran in stealth mode alongside Hawkeye on the tournament’s center court—side-by-side testing, every call compared. In 2024, Bolt6 handled all Australian Open lead-up events and expanded to testing alongside Hawkeye on three stadium courts during the main tournament. Only after two years of testing did Tennis Australia deploy Bolt6 across all 17 courts for the entire 2025 summer, fully replacing Hawkeye.

Risk/reward

The gamble paid off. Bolt6’s cloud architecture unlocked capabilities Hawkeye couldn’t deliver. Because the system is cloud-based, Tennis Australia could centralize operations—running all courts from one location instead of requiring on-site servers at each venue. The system processes faster and integrates with other platforms more easily, opening new possibilities beyond just calling lines.

In fact, it’s Bolt6’s technology that drives the skeletal tracking and 360-degree camera system that AO Labs integrated to create the Wii-style animations and dynamic broadcast angles. Technology that started as line calling evolved into a dynamic broadcasting tool.

“It is a genuine partnership around how to create stories for the viewer at home,” says James Japhet, Bolt6 cofounder and chief commercial officer. “It’s not just us doing it, this is us working hand in hand with Tennis Australia.”

The partnership has turbocharged Bolt6’s growth. The company went from being deployed at three events in 2023 to 40 in 2024, around 90 in 2025, and now a projected 170 events in 2026, expanding beyond tennis into sports like NASCAR and the PGA Tour.

“I don’t think we would have had that same trajectory without the partnership and support of Tennis Australia,” Japhet says.

A global stage for tech startups

Another company, Raven Controls, came through AO Startups in 2023 with a different kind of technology. Founder Ian Kerr, a former police officer in Scotland who specialized in emergency planning, had built an incident management platform after witnessing chaos at major events—safety decisions that weren’t properly logged, stakeholders who couldn’t communicate, critical information lost in radio chatter.

Raven digitizes that coordination. The platform is cloud-based and AI-driven, creating one centralized system where every incident gets logged, every decision gets recorded, and security, medical, and crowd control teams can all see what’s happening in real time.

“Before Raven, these systems were all siloed,” Kerr explains. “Security would know about an incident, but medical wouldn’t. Or crowd management would see a problem, but it would take 20 minutes to coordinate a response.”

By the time Kerr connected with Tennis Australia in 2023, Raven had already managed UEFA Champions League finals, two Euro soccer championships, and two Ryder Cups.

Reid saw the value immediately. The platform could handle the complexity of coordinating security, operations, and emergency response across Melbourne Park’s 17 courts and sprawling grounds. The AO Startups pilot tested Raven across Tennis Australia’s summer events in 2023, giving Kerr’s team real-world feedback at scale while providing global exposure beyond their European base.

Completing the innovation loop

With the in-house lab and external tech incubators thriving, in January 2025 Tennis Australia completed the innovation loop, launching a $30 million fund called AO Ventures. Backed by 150 investors, including venture capitalist Brad Feld and prominent Australian families, the fund writes checks of around $500,000 for seed rounds and $1 million for Series A, according to Reid.

To date, four investments have closed: Bolt6 and Raven, along with two padel properties—Mindspring Padel and Padel Haus. The goal, according to Reid, is to invest in approximately 20 companies, with at least five emerging from the AO Startups pipeline.

The key, Reid says, is that Tennis Australia becomes not just the investor, but ideally the customer as well. “Our best way of delivering return is for us to be a client and be able to shout from the rooftops,” he says.

After Raven completed its pilot and became a Tennis Australia client, the company competed for a contract with Legends Global, which operates more than 300 stadiums across North America. Legends conducted due diligence with Tennis Australia, and its reference, Kerr says—combined with Raven’s proven performance across Tennis Australia’s events—is what helped Raven win the contract.

“Having Tennis Australia as a part of our profile has absolutely given us a massive stamp of approval at a very senior level,” Kerr says. “That support was invaluable to us.”

A 70% success rate

Ten startups are participating in the 2026 tournament, including the National Pickleball League, VueMotion, and Truefuels. Since launching in 2022, 40 companies have piloted their technology through AO Startups. Some 70% have become Tennis Australia suppliers or partners—a conversion rate that significantly outperforms typical corporate accelerator programs, where 40% to 50% is considered strong.

Tiley has said he wants to make the Australian Open “the biggest sporting event in the world.” The three-pronged innovation engine turning startups into global players is driving the Open to ever-higher levels of fan engagement.

“From a leadership point of view, I tell the team to come and ask for forgiveness, not permission,” Tiley told Boardroom. “The approach is: Just go for it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we’ll just make some adjustments and give it a go again.”

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