This App Scouts Your Kid With a Phone Camera. A $930 Billion Fund Just Bought It.

Most youth athletes will never get scouted. Not because they aren't good enough, but because nobody's watching.

That's the problem ai.io set out to solve. And now Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund is betting it can solve it at global scale.

The Deal

HUMAIN, the AI company owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), just acquired a controlling stake in the London-based sports tech company. The deal launches HUMAIN Sport, a dedicated AI-for-sports arm backed by PIF capital and the fund's massive web of global sports relationships. No financial terms were disclosed.

How the Tech Works

Here's what ai.io actually built. Their core tech is called 3DAT — markerless motion capture that turns ordinary smartphone video into structured biomechanical data. No sensors. No lab. No special equipment. Just a camera and AI.

That powers two products. aiScout is the talent discovery side. Athletes record themselves doing standardized drills on their phone, the AI scores their movement, and results get surfaced to clubs and academies. MLS used it across 45,000 youth athletes. Chelsea and Burnley are partners. The company has even identified talent in rural India and Senegal. Then there's aiLab, which handles performance analysis for coaches and training staff — think real-time data layered into existing facilities.

Why They Grew Slowly on Purpose

Now here's where the story gets interesting. ai.io deliberately pumped the brakes on growth.

"If you scale too quickly, you get out of your depth too quickly," said COO Richard Felton-Thomas. "You don't have the team to actually support it once it's all live. So I think we were quite sensible with really doubling down on the MLS and Chelseas and Burnleys. We put off a bit of that scale."

That restraint wasn't a weakness. It was a strategy. They didn't chase volume. They proved the tech works where the stakes are highest — and that validation is now the foundation for rapid scale. It's a playbook worth paying attention to. Companies that earn trust before chasing growth tend to be the ones that survive when the money shows up.

And the money just showed up.

"There's no excuses now," Felton-Thomas said. "Expanding the team to deliver aiScout and aiLab across global football is priority one."

Why Saudi Arabia's Wealth Fund Is Building a Sports Tech Empire

This isn't PIF's first sports play either. The fund already sits behind LIV Golf, the ATP and WTA tennis tours, the PFL, the Saudi Pro League, and Newcastle United. But this deal signals something different. PIF isn't just buying sports properties anymore. They're building the infrastructure layer underneath them. HUMAIN Sport gives them a tech product that can plug into every sports asset they already own or partner with.

Felton-Thomas was blunt about what that means commercially: "We want them to be involved as much as possible because they have lots of rights and lots of sponsorships, and that's a sales pipeline for us."

What's Next for ai.io

The immediate priority is scaling across global football. After that, expansion into baseball, American football, tennis, and adjacent industries like healthcare and physical therapy. The underlying motion capture tech was originally developed with Intel and trained across every sport, so multi-sport expansion isn't theoretical. ai.io has also opened U.S. office space in Indiana as part of the Sports Tech HQ collective, which tells you the American market is a near-term target.

What This Means for Youth Sports Investors

Zoom out and the bigger trend is hard to miss. Automated talent identification is becoming a real infrastructure category in youth sports. Between Pixellot turning high school gyms into broadcast studios, Diamond Kinetics building sensor-based development tools, and now ai.io turning any smartphone into a scouting device, the tools that identify, develop, and showcase young athletes are attracting serious capital. Sovereign wealth funds are investing in sports tech, not just sports assets. And any tool that turns a phone camera into a professional evaluation system has a built-in global distribution channel with zero hardware sales cycle.

One thing to watch closely as these platforms scale: data governance. Analyzing youth athletes via smartphone video raises real questions about consent, biometric data handling, and cross-border compliance. It's not a dealbreaker. But it's the kind of thing that becomes a much bigger conversation once you're operating in dozens of countries with millions of kids on the platform.

ai.io spent years building credibility by staying small. Now the governor is off.