Combat IQ is an AI-powered data analytics company headquartered in London. They apply machine learning and computer vision to combat sports. Combat IQ uses technology to change the way fans interact with combat sports, making the experience more engaging, insightful, and accessible.

Combat IQ’s journey began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their CEO, a former professional football scout, found himself yearning for the excitement of live sports amid widespread event cancellations. He soon identified a significant gap in combat sports: the lack of a robust data analytics infrastructure–a staple in other major sports like football and basketball. Frustrated by the absence of data-driven insights into fighter performance, he and his CTO turned this idea into a trailblazing business. They developed cutting-edge data solutions for some of the world’s largest combat sports organizations, leading to groundbreaking innovations. This collaboration also helped forge a deep and enduring friendship between the founders, laying the foundation for a company culture rooted in passion, teamwork, and innovation.

Combat sports enthusiasts enjoy watching sessions live, making it essential for Combat IQ to deliver a highly reliable and stable system for their real-time analytics platform. Computing capabilities are crucial to enable real-time motion tracking and analysis. Low latency is key to ensuring the scalability of their solutions for customers around the globe.

Combat IQ migrated their infrastructure to Alibaba Cloud because they sought a more transparent and cost-effective solution, without compromising on performance.

• Reliability & Scale: Alibaba Cloud provides the robust reliability and scalability Combat IQ needs for their real-time combat sports analytics system. This ensures low-latency processing for computer vision models, and a stable infrastructure to support video streaming and API services. Such capabilities are crucial as the company expands its solution to serve a wider audience.

• Computation Efficiency: Alibaba Cloud offers virtual machines (VMs) powered by high-performance computing resources, which optimized for computer vision inference workloads.It's critical for real-time motion tracking and analytics.

• Transparent Pricing Model: A key advantage Combat IQ discovered with Alibaba Cloud was its transparent and predictable pricing model. This enabled their team to more effectively manage operational costs.

Combat IQ primarily used Alibaba Cloud's Elastic Cloud Service (ECS) to deploy their own virtual machines (VMs). These VMs power the company’s computer vision models, video streaming infrastructure, and API services.

• Seamless Setup & Configuration: One of the standout features of Alibaba Cloud is its highly customizable VM setup. The platform provides an intuitive interface where they can preconfigure instances with specific operating systems, disk space, network bandwidth. This level of flexibility allows them to streamline their deployment process significantly. Also backups, as well as up-scaling and down-scaling machines, have worked smoothly so far.

• Integration & Implementation: Once the VMs are provisioned, they access them via SSH and configure them to meet their operational needs. This includes installing their deep learning models, optimizing system performance for low-latency inference, and setting up video streaming and API to deliver real-time fight analytics.

This partnership has led to major performance improvements and cost efficiencies:

• Operational cost efficiency improved by 40.75%
• Average lead time efficiency for successful system set up improved by 62.5%
• Deep learning model inference time reduced by 31.58%

Given the rapid advancements in AI, and having witnessed Alibaba Cloud's expertise in sports analytics at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Combat IQ plans to explore Alibaba Cloud's AI solutions to further enhance their capabilities. In particular, they are keen to explore their Generative AI offerings in areas such as automated content generation, enhanced motion analysis, and other AI-driven breakthroughs in sports technology, ensuring they stay at the forefront of innovation in combat sports.

Combat IQ also plans to integrate API Gateway into its workflow, and combine Elastic Block Storage (EBS) with Object Storage Service (OSS) to meet their increasing needs for cloud data storage.