Capital golfing technology firm secures fresh funding
● Shot Scope set up by ‘golf addict’ CEO David Hunter ● Firm has now attracted total of £4.5m in funding
An Edinburgh-based developer of a performance-tracking watch for golfers has raised £1.6 million in its latest funding round.
Shot Scope Technologies has now raised a total of £4.5m since its launch in December 2014, attracting investments from high-net-worth individuals, the Scottish Investment Bank, Equity Gap and Old College Capital, the investment fund of the University of Edinburgh.
The latest funding round is the company’s third, following a £1.6m fundraising in 2016 and a £400,000 round in 2015. The business has also received some £1m in government grants.
Shot Scope is said to be the only wearable golf device that both automatically tracks a player’s performance and provides live yardage distances on the golf course.
It enables players of all standards to closely monitor, analyse and ultimately improve their game, and the device is approved by global rulesetting bodies The R&A and the United States Golf Association.
The watch works with small tags placed in the grips of a player’s golf clubs, and performancetrackingandlivedistance data is enabled through Shot Scope’s own mapping service and Smart GPS. Free, propriety smartphone apps or web interface enable detailed statistical analysis of every shot after the round.
Company founder and chief executive David Hunter said: “This investment enables us to scale up manufacturing, scale up marketing and scale up sales.”
The firm has pre-sales of its “Shot Scope V2” in 30 countries and expects to ship at least 20,000 units over the next year.
Hunter, an electronics design engineer by background and a self-declared “golf addict”, came up with the idea for Shot Scope while studying to become a teacher at Moray House School of Education, part of the University of Edinburgh.
Half-way through his oneyear course he entered and won a competition run by LAUNCH.ED, the entrepreneurship support service for the university’s students and recent graduates.
“For the next six months, I got really involved in everything offered by LAUNCH. ed,” said Hunter. “They ran training courses, I was meeting with them every couple of weeks, I was put in touch with the Scottish Institute for Enterprise and the Converge Challenge.”
He described the US as “by far our biggest opportunity”. Family pork producer Robertson’s Fine Foods of Ayrshire has secured its first listing with supermarket major Morrisons. The range – which features pork sausages, pork chipolatas and cracked black pepper sausages – is now available in 35 Morrisons stores across Scotland. The deal is worth some £50,000 to the firm in its first year. Lewis Robertson, Barry Robertson and Cameron Robertson are pictured with the family firm’s new sausages at their home in Ayrshire.