IN CONVERSATION

SWUPNIL SAHAI and his co-founder serve an ace with Al-powered Swing Vision

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While Swupnil Sahai hasn't stepped out onto the hallowed clay at the French Open or the grass court at Wimbledon, he owes his livelihood to tennis a passion he traces back to his childhood.

Growing up in the Bay Area, the CEO and co-founder of tennis app performance-tracking SwingVision only available on the App Store - spent much of his time out on the court. An early interest stoked by his father led Sahai to play on his high school tennis team, and eventually the sport served as a form of stress relief while he attended the University of California, Berkeley.

While working as an engineer on a team that used 3D object tracking to help refine autonomous driving, Sahai a two-time WWDC scholar - had an epiphany: The same techniques and principles he was using on the job could help him level up on the tennis court. However, the tools that were available on the market for tracking and analyzing his game were expensive, cumbersome, and often hard to come by.

"Back then, you had a few companies making sensors you could attach to your rackets, and they would track some data," Sahai elaborates. "And in terms of using cameras, the closest thing was this 10-camera system that some high-end clubs had, but it was around $10,000 a court."

When Apple Watch launched in April 2015, Sahai recognized the potential of a device that would bring intelligence right to a user's wrist. The seed for the idea that ultimately became SwingVision began to sprout.

"That sparked my brain right away. I thought, 'If I have a computer on my wrist, I could actually analyze my form and my strokes,"" he says, looking back at the initial notes he made on his iPhone.