27 / 100

Foothills

August reading · Down from 32 in July · Updated 30 September 2026 · September reading lands next week
Funding and M&A data: SportsTechX Intelligence Hub

The index through 2026

Backdated on the same methodology. A strong spring, then a slide into Foothills as acquisitions outran new funding.

Backdated
Current

What’s behind the reading

This month’s read

The index reads 27 for August, the lowest month of the year, and the reason is not subtle. Venture funding across the whole of SportsTech came to $14.4M across nine deals (SportsTechX), the quietest month since the hub began tracking, while acquisitions ran at roughly five times the post-2021 norm relative to new funding.

The interesting line is the one that did not move. We logged 30 named buyer decisions in August against a 2026 average of 31, and the count has sat between 22 and 42 every month this year. Teams, leagues and venues kept buying while the capital that funds their vendors swung by a factor of fifty. That is the consolidation story told in two lines on one chart: demand steady, supply-side funding gone, so the vendors serving that demand get acquired rather than funded.

Category heat

Methodology

The PEAK Index measures market conditions, not sentiment. Each reading is a weighted composite of five inputs, scored 0 to 100 and recalculated monthly. Every input is computed on a trailing three-month window and scored against a fixed baseline, so a reading of 50 means a typical month of the 2022 to 2025 period.

• Capital volume (25%) — trailing 90-day disclosed funding against the 2022-25 monthly average of $581M.
• Buyer signals (20%) — named buyer decisions per week: technology deployments, vendor selections, venue capital projects and commercial-technology partnerships, counted from a fixed list of trade sources. Pure sponsorships and investor rounds are excluded. The only demand-side input, and the only one we build ourselves.
• Deal count (15%) — disclosed rounds against the 2022-25 average of 28 a month.
• Early-stage pipeline (25%) — pre-seed through Series A as a share of deal count. Also stands in for new company formation, which is not tracked reliably enough to score on its own.
• M&A balance (15%) — acquisition value relative to new funding, against the 2022-25 ratio of 0.82. A month at the baseline ratio scores 50, twice the ratio scores 33, five times scores 17. The scale never reaches zero, so heavy-consolidation months stay distinguishable.

The bands. Readings run from Base Camp through Foothills, Ascending and Climbing to Summit. Higher is not automatically better. A Summit reading means capital is abundant, deal count is surging and almost nobody is selling, which is a good market to raise in and a dangerous one to sign a three-year contract in. SportsTech funding peaked at $13.3B in 2021 and fell to $2.3B by 2023. The summit is not somewhere you want to stay.

Single-deal exclusions. Where one transaction would distort a monthly figure, we report it separately rather than blending it in. The $55B take-private of Electronic Arts sits outside our September numbers for that reason, as Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery does for Q1 2026.

Sources. Funding and M&A data from the SportsTechX Intelligence Hub, used for both the monthly inputs and the 2022-25 baseline so that like is compared with like. Note the hub is broader in scope than the Global SportsTech Ecosystem Report, which PEAK also supports; the two are not interchangeable. Buyer signals are compiled by PEAK from Stadium Tech Report and Sports Video Group, both read in full for 2026, with SportsTechX Weekly logged as a supplementary source pending a full-year backfill. Public announcements only, no paid placement.

Four of five inputs are currently live. Early-stage pipeline joins in Q4 once monthly stage data is backfilled. Until then the reading is calculated across the four live inputs, renormalized to their combined weight of 75%. Readings for January to July 2026 are backdated on the same methodology.