This is the fifth in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. Read part one, part two, part three and part four and get more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.

The cricket tech stack

Over the first four chapters of this series, we diagnosed a sport that had lost its coherence. We met Alicia, a fan drowning in noise, and Raj, a player consumed by the churn. One overwhelmed by excess; the other stretched thin by it.

This chapter is about the fix, and not another league or broadcast deal, but the tools being built quietly behind the scenes. Because for both Alicia and Raj, the path forward isn’t paved with more noise; it’s built with sharper instruments, smarter data, and deeper context.

(Disclosure: The author is an advisor, investor or involved in several cricket technology ventures, including Deep22, Kabuni and StanceBeam. All opinions expressed are independent and focused on broader industry analysis.)

We don’t fix cricket with more content.

We fix it with technology that makes the game make sense again.

But technology isn’t replacing cricket’s heart; it’s helping us listen to it better. The best tools don’t sterilise the emotion or intuition that make the game special; they make those qualities visible. Cricket has always been a dance between precision and chaos. Tech simply helps us read the steps.

1. Building a product for Alicia

For Alicia, the problem isn’t love, it’s friction.

Cricket has become a wall of information: too many matches, too little meaning. She doesn’t need another fantasy app or streaming feed. She needs something that helps her feel the game again.

Enter a generation of product-first cricket tech companies rebuilding the on-ramp for fans while deepening the bond for existing ones.

Kabuni is one of them. Branded as the ‘ChatGPT for Cricket,’ it turns archived footage and live clips into real-time, conversational coaching. Alicia can record a moment, ask “What just happened there?”, and receive an annotated replay with visual overlays and training context. What began as an elite coaching tool is now a universal explainer, bridging the gap between cricket’s complexity and a newcomer’s curiosity. It transforms every highlight into a small act of learning.

Then there’s Deep22, the quiet engine behind cricket’s highlight revolution. Using AI and machine vision, it detects moments that matter (wickets, boundaries, reactions) and edits them into regionally tailored reels before the next over is bowled.

Alicia can wake up in Toronto or Tokyo, open her phone, and see the match distilled for her timezone, players, and even preferred commentary tone. Cricket becomes familiar again. Personal, efficient, human.

These are translators of cricket’s complexity, not replacements for its wonder. They turn curiosity into habit, and habit into belonging.

2. Building a platform for Raj

Raj lives on the other side of the boundary rope.

He’s a professional navigating an endless calendar, juggling form, fatigue, and expectation. His needs are practical: tools that preserve skill, prevent breakdowns, and deliver feedback that keeps him ahead of the next delivery.

StanceBeam leads the way, providing true cricket intelligence, not just fitness tracking. Its smart-bat sensor captures swing data – speed, angle, power efficiency – and feeds it into a coaching app that translates movement into meaning. For Raj, it’s a personal biomechanic in his pocket, catching small flaws in his technique during a net session before they become costly habits.

Arc Simulations goes one step further, uniting ball-tracking and simulation in one holistic ecosystem that captures bowling and batting together. Its smart balls transmit data (mapping swing, seam, and impact) into a simulation engine, allowing Raj to face digital replicas of real bowlers in the nets – playing out complete matches, not just isolated drills. He can experiment with his footwork against a virtual Bumrah, see the 3D playback of his shot seconds later, and truly rehearse for a match, turning practice into performance.

StumpEye reimagines the most iconic piece of equipment: the stump. Wireless HD cameras embedded within stream every delivery from the centre of play, capturing deflections, nicks, and angles with forensic precision. It also helps with umpiring and officiating too, which is usually a big miss when it comes to new tech that focuses on fan, broadcast, or player. For Raj, it means trust. No fuzzy replays or missing frames, just evidence from the source.

Together, these platforms form examples of the backbone of a new ecosystem; one built on measurement, feedback, and fairness. They don’t replace intuition; they refine it.

3. The convergence layer

Now imagine these worlds, Alicia’s and Raj’s, beginning to merge.

This is the single most exciting frontier for the sport, moving beyond two separate tech stacks into one living feedback loop between player, data, and fan.

This convergence is where the true value lies. The data from Alicia’s viewing patterns might one day inform Raj’s training. The clips she watches most – a flick, a pull, a slower ball – could feed algorithms that tell coaches what fans connect with emotionally.

At the same time, Raj’s performance data could enrich the content delivered back to Alicia’s feed, turning raw performance into personalised storytelling.

Here, we can imagine Alicia's feed not just showing that Raj hit a six, but why – a pop-up showing his bat speed from StanceBeam was 10% faster than his average. Picture a broadcaster using StumpEye's feed not for a fuzzy replay, but to show, in real-time, the 2mm deflection that Raj's coach identified last week in the Arc simulator.

This is cricket’s next great leap: AI as the connective tissue that keeps context flowing both ways, making the fan smarter and the player sharper.

4. Beyond the broadcast: Hawkeye vs. The Stack

Cricket has, of course, led the world in sports technology before. The most famous example is Hawkeye. It revolutionised officiating and changed how fans watch the game.

But Hawkeye is ‘presentation tech’. It’s a broadcast tool designed to make the show better. It doesn't fundamentally change how Raj trains or how Alicia discovers the sport.

The technology we’re discussing is different. It's not just a layer on top of the broadcast; it's the ‘picks and shovels’ (as we explored in Article 3) that form the sport's new foundation.

This is ‘performance tech’ (StanceBeam, Arc) and ‘platform tech’ (Kabuni, Deep22). It’s the infrastructure, not just the overlay.

5. Dream11 and the deep-tech builders

Dream11 proved what’s possible when cricket meets scale at the consumer layer. The fantasy-sports giant reshaped how fans engage, turning knowledge into participation and building a multi-billion-dollar business in the process. It remains one of India’s few true unicorns (startups valued over $1 billion) even as it faces turbulence from India’s tightening online-gaming legislation. Those regulations will have ripple effects across fantasy cricket, and we’ll explore that in a later piece.

For now, Dream11’s legacy is clear: it showed that cricket can spawn world-class technology. Yet beneath that consumer layer, something quieter and more durable is emerging.
The deep-tech builders are creating cricket’s operating system, the invisible infrastructure deciding how the sport is played, coached, and trusted.

They’re not chasing viral moments; they’re engineering permanence.

StanceBeam transforms the bat into a precision instrument, converting feel into data.

Arc Simulations turns training into a digital proving ground where experimentation is infinite and failure is free.

StumpEye embeds truth inside the game itself.

Kabuni listens, analyses, and teaches, scaling coaching so a teenager in Dhaka can learn like a pro in Durham.

These ventures build the foundations that consumer platforms depend on. They’re the firmware beneath the fandom.

Dream11 rode the wave of cricket’s attention; the deep-tech layer is what ensures that wave never crashes.

6. Strengthening the roots

These startups aren’t just grafting new leaves onto cricket’s old tree, they’re thickening the trunk. Dream11 showed that cricket-specific innovation can scale, but the deep-tech builders are creating the base that makes that possible: technique refinement, officiating accuracy, data integrity, and coaching precision.

They’re building defensible systems (bat plus app, stump plus stream, simulation plus analysis) that could become cricket’s next billion-dollar companies while serving as blueprints for other sports.

Because if your technology can survive cricket’s complexity, it can survive anywhere.

Cricket becomes the testbed, a living lab for global sports innovation.

7. The choice ahead

In the first article we asked whether cricket could still matter.

Now we can see the answer taking shape and just not in stadium boardrooms or rights deals, but in codebases, training halls, and design labs.

These innovators represent both the threat and the salvation of the sport: small, fast-moving teams building the tools that legacy institutions still treat as accessories.

To their credit, the ICC has started to recognise this shift. The 2023 NEOM hackathon and the upcoming global innovation challenge are smart steps toward opening the door to new ideas. The challenge now is scaling that mindset beyond events, embedding these deep-cricket tech platforms into everyday decision-making, not just celebrating them once a year.
The ICC and national boards can partner with these builders and evolve, or watch relevance drift quietly away. Cricket doesn’t need to fear technology; it needs to guide it. The best AI and data systems won’t decide who wins the game. They’ll help us understand why.

The future of cricket will still be written by humans, just with better instruments.

The tools are here. The roots are deeper.

The only question left is whether the system will let them grow.

This is the fifth in a series exploring the future of cricket by Eddie Fitzgibbon, a Wisden board member and strategic advisor specialising in cricket with a focus on the USA market and sports technology. Read part one, part two, part three and part four and get more from Eddie on his Substack and connect with him on LinkedIn.