Catapult Sports

The Business

Catapult provides the technology stack that professional sports teams use to monitor athlete performance, analyse tactics, and produce broadcast content. It is the only platform that bundles wearable GPS trackers, video analysis, gym monitoring, and scouting into a single integrated offering. More than 4,300 teams across 40 sports use Catapult's products, generating US$141M in annual revenue, of which 95% is recurring subscription income. The company reports in US dollars but is listed in Sydney and headquartered in Melbourne. Its three divisions, Performance & Health (55% of revenue), Tactics & Coaching (33%), and Media (13%), serve overlapping customer bases with increasing product cross-sell.

Recent Performance

FY26 revenue grew 21% to US$141M, off a base that itself grew 17% the prior year, confirming genuine momentum rather than base-effect flattery. Management EBITDA, which excludes stock-based compensation (SBC), reached US$25M, an 18% margin, up from 13% in FY25 and effectively zero two years earlier. Organic ACV growth ran at 18% in constant currency for the third consecutive year. The stock has re-rated sharply on this execution, roughly tripling from its 2023 lows as the market priced in a profitable SaaS growth story.

Outlook

Revenue growth is expected to moderate from 21% as the base scales past US$160M, with management EBITDA margins expanding further as operating leverage compounds on the 80% gross margin. The structural challenge that overhangs the outlook is stock-based compensation, which currently consumes 18% of revenue. Until SBC compresses meaningfully, statutory profits remain negative and free cash flow stays near zero. SBC trajectory is the single most important variable for long-term shareholders, and management has said nothing to indicate compression is a stated objective.

Key Risks

SBC dilution is the dominant risk. Annual share dilution of 4-5% transfers meaningful wealth from existing shareholders to employees, with no buyback capacity to offset it. Organic ACV growth deceleration below 12% would likely trigger multiple compression across the stock, given current valuation levels require sustained outperformance across several inputs. Goodwill of US$113M on US$212M of total equity, concentrated in the Perch and IMPECT acquisitions completed in FY26, creates impairment risk if those businesses underperform, particularly IMPECT, which doubled the company's headcount and introduced significant integration complexity.

What to Watch

The thesis-defining event is the H1 FY27 result in November 2026, which will reveal whether organic ACV growth sustains above 16% and whether SBC as a percentage of revenue is compressing from the current 18%.

• November 2026 H1 FY27 organic ACV and SBC ratio — ACV growth holding above 16% combined with SBC beginning to compress would support the growth thesis; both missing would shift probability meaningfully toward the bear case.
• Next 12 months Broader SaaS multiple repricing — if markets begin penalising SBC as a real economic cost across the sector, ASX tech names could correct 20-30%, with CAT particularly exposed given the current SBC load and pre-profit status.

Company Description

Catapult Sports operates across three divisions that share a common customer base of professional and elite sports teams. Performance & Health (P&H), contributing 55% of FY26 revenue at US$78M, centres on wearable GPS devices and inertial sensors that track athlete workload, injury risk, and physical readiness. Tactics & Coaching (T&C), at 33% or US$46M, provides video analysis and AI-powered tactical tools, recently expanded by the IMPECT acquisition into European football scouting. Media, the smallest division at 13% or US$18M, delivers broadcast-quality statistics and graphics primarily for American football and basketball leagues. All three divisions sell subscriptions, typically two to five year terms, with hardware bundled into the contract price. The company added roughly 576 new professional teams in FY26, bringing the total installed base above 4,300.

Where the Growth Is

Tactics & Coaching is the primary growth engine. It grew 24% in FY26 off a base that itself grew 23%, making this genuine sustained momentum rather than easy-base flattery. The segment benefits from multi-solution attach, where teams already using Catapult's wearables add video and scouting tools. That attach rate sits at 32% and is rising 62% year-on-year. Cross-sell is structural, not transient: once a team integrates multiple Catapult products into daily coaching workflows, the switching cost compounds and the revenue opportunity per team expands without requiring new customer acquisition.

Competitive Position

Catapult holds approximately 45% of the professional wearables market and is the number two provider of team video analysis. No other company offers wearables, video, gym monitoring, and scouting on a single platform. This breadth matters because it creates a proprietary dataset, 15 years and five petabytes of ground-truth athlete performance data across 40 sports, that no competitor can assemble from scratch. STATSports and Kinexon compete in wearables but lack the video and scouting layers. Hudl leads in video but has no wearable offering. Sportradar and Genius Sports serve adjacent markets in sports data and betting but do not compete for coaching workflow budgets.

The 96% ACV retention rate over a 7.5-year average customer lifetime confirms that switching costs are real and high. Teams embed Catapult's tools into daily operations, and the accumulated historical data for each athlete becomes increasingly valuable over time. These advantages are widening as data compounds, and they are unlikely to erode within five to seven years absent a fundamental technology disruption or entry by a platform player.

Management and Capital Discipline

CEO Will Lopes has overseen a significant transformation since arriving in 2020, shifting the company from a hardware vendor to a subscription SaaS model. In FY26 alone, management completed two acquisitions, Perch for gym monitoring and IMPECT for soccer scouting, and doubled headcount from 440 to 940. ACV growth targets have been consistently exceeded for three years running. The Perch deal at roughly 12x revenue was aggressive by any standard. IMPECT at 5.5x was more measured. Capital allocation discipline is mixed.

Management has said nothing about compressing stock-based compensation, which currently runs at 18% of revenue. The silence suggests they view 4-5% annual dilution as a permanent feature of the compensation model, not a transitional cost. For existing shareholders, that is the single most important capital allocation decision being made, and it is being made by omission rather than by stated strategy.

Financial Position

The balance sheet is clean. Catapult holds US$53M in cash with zero debt and a US$30M undrawn credit facility, providing roughly two years of runway at current burn rates. Goodwill of US$113M represents 53% of total equity of US$212M, concentrated in the Perch and IMPECT acquisitions. This is manageable if the acquisitions perform, and a material impairment risk if they do not. Operating cash flow of US$39M in FY26 was positive, though this figure includes US$26M in non-cash SBC add-backs. On a true cash basis, the company is roughly breakeven.