Our Direct Line to the Tour de France

The World Cup is in full swing and Wimbledon just wrapped up, but we can't claim any clients from football or tennis in our portfolio (not yet, anyway). What we can claim is a direct connection to the Tour de France, and it's one of our favorite stories to tell.

Back in the early days of UNICO, one of our first great clients was ROUVY, a platform that lets cyclists ride real Tour de France étapes from their own living rooms. Next year marks ten years since we joined forces with the team from Vimperk.

The idea itself goes back even further, to 2005, when brothers and competitive cyclists Petr and Jiří Samek - riding at the foot of the Šumava hills through their company Virtual Training - first dreamed up connecting an indoor trainer to video of the passing landscape. By 2017, their in-house prototype for projecting cycling routes from 2D into 3D had shown huge potential, but also just how technically hard it would be to pull off.

That's where we came in. We used our network to identify the five scientific teams best suited to help, and ROUVY chose to work with Professor Adam Herout's group at Brno University of Technology. Together, they integrated augmented reality into the app, turning flat footage into a true 3D world where cyclists ride as 3D avatars on geosynchronized video of real routes.

The growth that followed speaks for itself: the ROUVY team grew from 10 people in 2017 to 80 by 2021, annual turnover climbed from 20 to 100 million CZK, ROUVY became the exclusive partner of Spain's La Vuelta, and the company caught the eye of investor Pale Fire Capital: all culminating in this year's landmark acquisition by industry giant Zwift.

As founder Petr Samek put it: "UNICO found us a top-notch academic partner... without the development of this new technology, we would not have achieved our current global growth."

For us at UNICO, it's a real honor to have been there at the birth of that digital revolution. And just as we watch each étape in France with disbelief at what riders can do, we've watched ROUVY's climb to the top with the same amazement.

🚴‍♂️💛

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*UNICO helped ROUVY find its ideal academic partner as part of our Experts Scouting.