Emma Meehan is the founder of Galway based start – up Precision Sports Technology, which was the Best New Sports Business of the Year Award winner at the 2024 Irish Sport Industry Awards. Meehan describes herself as being obsessed with movement and dedicated to maximizing enjoyment of exercise. Emma’s entrepreneurial journey is totally inspiring. In 2018 she graduated from Galway University with a first class honors in computer science and information technology and subsequently spent three years as a software engineer at Cisco before founding Precision Sports Technology at the ATU Innovation Hub.
Meehan was named in Sport for Business’ 30 Under 30 Future Leaders in Tech 2022, Irish Times 50 People to Watch Ireland 2023, Sunday Independent 30 under 30 2023 and the Sunday Business Post 30 under 30 2024. Speaking to the Federation of Irish Sport, Meehan expressed her delight.
“I am absolutely thrilled to bits. I really didn’t expect to be here and it’s a massive honor to be recognised as Best New Sports Business at the Irish Sport Industry Awards. We’re thrilled to get this recognition from such a fantastic group of people.”
Precision Sports Technology has driven innovation in sports tracking.
“We have a software platform for real-time exercise feedback and analysis. With our app, you can know exactly how well you’re supposed to be doing your exercise. But your therapist or your strength coach can also get instant accurate measurements on how well you’re moving. So they know whether they actually need to intervene with your not, or whether you’re safe just to continue doing your rehab or exercise programme.”
In 2023, Output Sports was the winner of the Best New Sports Business of the Year Award, and recently its co-founder Dr. Martin O’Reilly outlined to the Federation that Output Sports technology is used by over 700 sport organisations and that they are on track to capture of 20 million measurements with the system this year.
Meehan is familiar with Output Sports work and said that Output Sports have demonstrated that there is a pathway for new Irish sports businesses’ to establish themselves as global players.
“We’ve just launched in the last couple of months, so we have our first paying customers. But really our goal is to break out of Europe and hit the US. We’re starting in sports now, but we hope to go into the global physiotherapy and gym fitness markets.”
Just a week after the 2024 Irish Sport Industry Awards, Meehan joined John Morley for a live in-studio interview on his ‘Galway Talks’ programme on Galway Bay FM. Despite only having officially launched the business in January, Precision Sports Technology client list is impressive and growing.
“We can’t name names, but we have a team that won the Champions League.” In terms of expansion plans in Ireland, Meehan is open minded.
“I think GAA is probably one of our bigger opportunities in Ireland. Especially since Precision Sports Technology is a software platform. We can tailor and scope our features as needed. Obviously the Champions League teams have any amount of budget for investing in technology, so we will give them all the bells and whistles. But we can also build a custom platform.
“If you’re a GAA strength and conditioning coach and you want to track 30 athletes and get these kinds of metrics and these kinds of exercises, perfect. And we’ll do the high end customisation for affluent teams internationally.”
Meehan summed up the journey she has been on with Precision Sports Technology so far.
“This time last year it was myself and two student interns from the university. Now we have ten of us on the team and international hires… It’s uphill from here”.