With Eo's SwimBETTER, swimmers can track critical KPIs such as average stroke rate and average force per stroke.

Whether it was Nike’s running shoes, Adidas’ football cleats or Under Armour’s compression sportswear, every sports brand has started with a signature, brand-defining product. The founders of Eo , a new Sydney-based entrant, seek to reinvent that paradigm by simultaneously developing and releasing a wide range of sports products in fairly rapid succession.

“We are product-agnostic, sport-agnostic and tech-agnostic, and that's totally unique in this game,” says Eo founder and chairman Jaimie Fuller, describing the company as fitting a horizontal business model rather than a more traditional silo-based structure.  

The remit of the company is wide, so long as its tools and devices fit under one or more of these four categories: enhance performance, improve recovery, prevent injury or assist rehabilitation. The first product available this month is SwimBetter , a pair of handheld devices that track and analyze swimming strokes, and will be followed later this year by NuroChek , a hospital-grade EEG that may be able to assist a clinician in diagnosing a concussion.   

SwimBETTER is a device small enough to fit in your palm.

The birth of Eo follows the assemblage of experienced industry leaders and a significant branding exercise. Fuller was previously executive chairman of Skins , a compression sportswear company. His other co-founders include CEO Dean Hawkins, a former CFO at Adidas, and principal scientist Kenneth Graham, who held the same title for 24 years at the New South Wales Institute of Sport. Also on the team is Dr. Paul Bloomfield, who spent six years as the chief medical officer of National Rugby League.

“We are technically a startup,” Fuller says, “but we're a startup of some pretty old wise heads.”  

While many startup founders are coached into specializing on executing one solution really well rather than spreading themselves too thin, Eo is deliberately bucking that trend. Eo was self-funded until last November. That was when Fuller raised what he calls “a relatively small amount of money,” noting that some potential investors were more reluctant to participate because of Eo’s diverse portfolio. He says their joint networks and experience are strong and thus are “super comfortable with the executional risk” of several unrelated products.  

The name “ Eo ” is Latin for “progress,” and the firm has applied a working slogan of “the science of defiance” as a pithy mission statement. Fuller describes an end goal of housing a suite of tech-centric products under the one brand. Three more are in advanced stages of research and development with launches likely in 2023, including a wearable hydration monitor and a re-conceived ankle brace. (Four are being wholly envisioned in-house; the NuroCheck technology has been licensed.)  

“It's not about accelerating human progress in sport, it's about accelerating it through sport, which takes us not just on the field — and of course, it's about creating products and developing products that help athletes on the field — but it's also having a very clear point of view about what happens off the field, specifically about the impact and the role that sport plays in the community,” Fuller says.  

“We're not interested in copying, we're not interested in trying to outmarket others. This is about coming up with proprietary devices that don't exist, that provide benefits that can’t be bought anywhere else.”  

SwimBetter has arrived first, available on an invite-only basis for the next couple of weeks before a full public sale on June 15. Two devices are available; one for about $800 and another with more memory for $1,000. A software subscription is available for an additional cost. Several swimmers can share the same hardware, although each will need his or her own subscription. Six-time Olympic medalist swimmer Kyle Chalmers, who won gold in the 100-meter freestyle in 2016, has signed on to be a brand ambassador, as has French triathlete Vincent Luis, who won Olympic bronze at the Tokyo Games.  

The devices are essentially “a power meter for a swimmer,” Fuller says, likening them to the popular cyclist training aid. SwimBetter looks a bit like a faceless watch that the wearer straps across his or her palm. Chock full of inertial measurement units (IMUs), SwimBetter can calculate the force, magnitude and direction of movement in the water.

Among the launch features is a stroke visualization tool, which maps each hand’s path through the water, indicating its depth, speed and force. As more data gets collected, Eo will apply more machine learning algorithms to analyze the data. Brant Best, a coach best known for his work with Australian Olympic medalist James Magnussen, is collaborating with Eo on its data inclusion and presentation. Form is personal, so Eo won’t try to define its own universally optimal technique.

SwimBetter measures stroke path and hand velocity among other KPIs.

“There’s no such thing as the perfect stroke, and what might be the perfect stroke for Caeleb Dressel is not the perfect stroke for Kyle Chalmers,” Fuller says. “ So this is about more so about individuals being able to measure it, see it, get objective data, tweak, learn from it and then see what the result is.”  

Swimming Australia has partnered with SwimBetter through an innovation program in which the governing body will help co-develop features and retain exclusive use of them for 18 months before they become widely available.  

NuroCheck received 510(k) clearance from the FDA in April 2020, indicating efficacy of its EEG, with Fuller adding that clinical trials are underway to verify its utility in diagnosing concussion symptoms. The headworn device can provide a reading in about two minutes and isn’t a standalone assessment but, rather, “a very important part of a clinician’s tool bag that gives them an objective reading of the brain's response,” he says.  

A swimming analysis wearable and an EEG tool have little in common, but that’s the point. What they do share is an athletic performance tie-in and a mass market opportunity. According to Fuller, Eo will consider anything.  

“A s long as it provides a tangible benefit to the elite athlete and is commercializable ,” Fuller says. “I'm not interested in developing products that we can only sell 50 of them to federations around the world. This is a consumer play.”  

Photo credits: Courtesy of Eo

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