“Our plan is ambitious; it will take time and exceptional minds and leaders to come together focused on a new vision for sport. We don’t believe addressing the issue of youth sports injury is going to be easy, but we remain absolutely focused on why we are here: to address a strikingly overlooked issue in sport, to protect the future of sport and to make a difference to the lives of young people.”

Podium Analytics’ Annual Report and Financial Statements 2020/21 affirms significant progress made in the build-up to Podium’s Official Launch at 10 Downing Street in September 2021.

Ron Dennis CBE, the Founder and Chairman of Podium Analytics, said: “Since we formed Podium in 2019, we have purposefully kept ourselves largely under the radar. We have focused on defining a clear strategy, building an exceptional team, and establishing close collaborations and partnerships that will help to drive meaningful and measurable impact.”

“Our launch has added fuel to the already impassioned commitment of the Podium team” and this report reveals significant progress over the period (1 June 2020 - 31 May 2021), presenting key activities and achievements over 4 key focus areas: Research and Education, Data and Technology, Standards Development, Collaboration and Impact.

View Report

Key achievements outlined in the Annual Report and Financial Statements include:

• Completing a competitive tender and contracting process to select the world-leading University of Oxford as the home for the Podium Analytics Institute for Youth Sports Medicine and Technology.
• Securing collaboration agreements and progressing discussions with key Sports Governing Bodies including the RFU, England Hockey and England Athletics.
• Securing agreements with a wide range of state-funded and private schools regarding participation in our Schools Programme and the rollout of our injury insight platform, including the David Ross Education Trust, the Bohunt Trust, the United Learning Group and Wellington College.
• Developing a multi-sport, multi-context injury data and insight platform, and a high-performing and highly secure data lake environment, which sits at the heart of our research process, and invested heavily in our technology, security and data privacy infrastructure to ensure the highest security management.
• Receiving formal statements of support from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Department for Education.
• Securing further grant funding from Dreamchasing, a UK-based charitable Foundation, and completing an in-depth due diligence process with CVC Funds and CVC Foundation regarding additional founding funding.
• Securing a 3-year partnership agreement with OutSystems and support from Microsoft through the Microsoft AI for Social Impact Programme.

“We have welcomed new colleagues, founding funders, partners and supporters who have all embraced wholeheartedly the spirit of collaboration that not only drives us but that is crucial to ensuring meaningful impact…. It’s very clear that a safer world of sport is an ambition shared among many.”

Key figures from the report include:

• Total income for the year ending 31 May 2021 was £3.1 million (2020: £1.0 million) which largely represented grants received from the Dreamchasing Foundation.
• Total expenditure in the year of £1.8 million (2020: £0.6 million) predominantly related to the cost of developing the injury insight platform and developing the associated data protection framework and documentation, together with staff costs and administrative overheads.

“As biomedical researchers, we often have the opportunity to work on problems that impact human health, but we rarely get the chance to impact an entire generation…. I can attest that safety in sport represents a generational challenge.”