Utkarsh Yadav of KPro on AI-Powered Sports Assessments, Phygital Fan Engagement, and Scaling Youth Athlete Development Through Visual AI

StartupTalky presents Recap'25, a series of exclusive interviews where we connect with founders and industry leaders to reflect on their journey in 2025 and discuss their vision for the future.

In this edition of Recap’25, StartupTalky speaks with Utkarsh Yadav, Founder of KPro, who reflects on the shift from subjective, infrastructure-heavy sports evaluation to standardized, mobile-first athlete development powered by Visual AI. Yadav shares how KPro was built with a clear mission: to increase youth participation in sports, introduce structured benchmarking at scale, and make high-quality coaching accessible to every child especially across underserved and low-resource regions.

He explains how KPro delivers AI-powered, smartphone-based sports and fitness assessments for children and adolescents under 18, using computer vision, biomechanics, and machine learning to generate actionable performance insights without requiring wearables or expensive setup. The conversation explores KPro’s expansion in 2025 through initiatives like the KPro Olympiad, designed to drive mass participation and build standardized datasets for benchmarking, and KoachPro—an AI-powered coaching platform where athletes can upload mobile-recorded videos and receive technique analysis and improvement feedback. Yadav also highlights KPro’s move into phygital sports and fan engagement activations, using high-profile sporting events to demonstrate how gamified technology can democratize the sports experience and encourage wider movement participation.

StartupTalky: What service does KPro provide? What was the motivation/vision with which you started? 

Utkarsh Yadav: KPro provides AI-powered, mobile-based sports and fitness assessments for children and adolescents under 18. The motivation was to increase participation in sports, introduce standardized assessments, deliver AI assisted sports coaching to every kid and establish an integrated athlete rating system, ensuring every child has the Right to Play as a developmental tool.

StartupTalky: What new services have been added in the past year? What is/are the USP/s of your service?

Utkarsh Yadav: The KPro Olympiad was introduced to enable structured sports participation at scale to build a standardized dataset for benchmarking. KoachPro is our ai powered sports coaching platform where athletes can just bring mobile recorded video and get ai driven analysis and coaching to help improve their skills. Available at chat.kpro.ai

KPro has also expanded into fan engagement activation, using major sporting events as platforms to demonstrate how technology can democratise the sports experience. As part of this effort, KPro participated in the Aryna Sabalenka vs Nick Kyrgios ‘Battle of the Sexes’ tennis showcase in Dubai, using the event to highlight how AI-led technology can encourage wider participation and engagement in sport through gamification and phygital sports experiences in mobile.

The platform’s USPs include AI-powered assessments, mass participation capability, mobile accessibility, standardised reporting, and data-driven feedback for schools, coaches, parents, and institutions. KPro’s technology uses computer vision, biomechanics, and machine learning to deliver movement analysis and performance insights via smartphones, without the need for wearable devices. AI-powered virtual coaches, performance tracking, and gamification of phygital sports are designed to drive consistent movement and long-term participation, particularly among youth.

StartupTalky:  How has the industry you are in changed in recent years and how has your company adapted to these changes?

Utkarsh Yadav: The sports assessment industry has been largely subjective and infrastructure-heavy. KPro adapted by leveraging Visual AI to deliver scalable, standardized, and mobile-based assessments along with ai powered coaching to enable mass participation even in low-resource areas and underserved regions.

StartupTalky: What key metrics do you track to check the KPro's growth and performance?

Utkarsh Yadav: Key metrics include the number of assessments conducted in schools and academies onboarded (currently 50+), participation in Olympiad events, and adoption of AI-powered coaching tools by coaches and athletes on the KoachPro platform

StartupTalky: What were the most significant challenges KPro faced in the past year and how did you overcome them?

Utkarsh Yadav: Challenges included reaching underserved regions and ensuring participation from economically disadvantaged children. KPro addressed these by providing free assessments (1 in every 12) for such schools and training a network of assessors and volunteers for smooth operations. We also faced significant research challenges in making sure visual models can run inference on edge mobile compute making user accurate sports AI can be delivered on a mobile device and costs that the Indian income levels can absorb. We have 5 patents filed for fundamental model research we have invested in.

StartupTalky: What are the different strategies you use for marketing? Tell us about any growth hack that you pulled off.

Utkarsh Yadav: KPro uses a “6 Pincode Marketing model” targeting 15 new cities and tier 4 towns to expand reach. Growth strategies include leveraging school partnerships, grassroots outreach, and integrating AI-powered assessments to create compelling, data-backed value for stakeholders.

StartupTalky: What are the important tools and software you use to run your business smoothly?

Utkarsh Yadav: We at KPro use many AI research tools like NotebookLM and code gen tools like Cursor to ensure we can build and ship fast for a wide set of use cases spanning from assessment to ai coaching. We also use internal comms platforms like Slack while we have built our own set of internal tooling for data management, labelling, model training monitoring and more. We also leverage a wide range of open source tools to ensure system reliability, security and more.

StartupTalky: What opportunities do you see for future growth in your industry in India and the world? What kind of difference in market behavior have you seen between India and the world?

Utkarsh Yadav: Opportunities include scaling AI-powered sports assessment to schools nationally and internationally, especially in underserved areas. India’s market is underserved in structured youth sports assessment, whereas global markets like Australia already rely on volunteer-driven operations, highlighting a cultural and operational difference in adoption. Scaling Ai powered coaching at global scale is a massive opportunity across the globe and in India. With tech adoption in sports being led by the global markets we are excited about the adoption of ai coaching in golf, fitness, cricket and racquet sports on a global scale.

StartupTalky: How are you using AI, whether in service delivery, internal processes, or customer experience, and what impact has it created?

Utkarsh Yadav: AI is used in assessments, athlete benchmarking (Khiladi Ability Index), and generating video/text reports for students, parents, and coaches. This ensures standardized, scalable, affordable, and actionable insights, transforming sports participation from subjective evaluation to data-driven development.

StartupTalky: How do you plan to expand the Customers, service offering, and team base in the future?

Utkarsh Yadav: Plans include international expansion (Australia and UAE), scaling KoachPro, launching Smart Court solutions, expanding Visual AI to cover more sports, growing the Khiladi Klub initiative, and hiring in AI/tech, product, and partnerships.

StartupTalky: One tip that you would like to share with another Service company founder?

Utkarsh Yadav: Focus on building a scalable, technology-driven solution that addresses a genuine gap in the market, while ensuring accessibility and inclusivity at its core. When innovation is designed to reach beyond early adopters and serve real, underserved needs, it not only creates meaningful social impact but also builds strong, sustainable market traction over time.

Explore more Recap'25 interviews here.