AusIndustry support pays dividends for elite sports and human health

This Queensland-based start-up has developed equipment to measure human performance at its extremes. Now, expansion in allied health is in their sights. So far, the support of AusIndustry to build their business systems and fortify research efforts has helped them become a world leader, used by some of the world’s elite clubs and organisations.

Sam James and Laurie Malone founded VALD Performance in January 2015 with a single product - the NordBord. It’s an innovative device that has transformed the way athletes and their trainers can measure hamstring strength and balance – or imbalance.

Sam is an industrial designer and Laurie a lawyer. Both are graduates of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) where the NordBord was developed.

When QUT began to commercialise its NordBord prototype, Sam and Laurie jumped at the chance to take on the technology. They recognised its significant commercial potential, and they set up VALD to develop it.

Seven years later, the NordBord is just one of 10 products VALD produces to measure human performance and capability. It has international markets in elite sports around the world. There are 100 staff in Australia and another 50 around the globe including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, India, Japan, and South Africa.

The company name VALD (rhymes with ‘bold’) is an old Norse word evoking strength, control or power. It also chimes with the ‘Nordic curl’, the move athletes performed to generate the data on the early prototype, which eventually became the commercial ‘NordBord.’

“By the time we launched there was a lot of pent-up demand for the NordBord. That allowed us to fund the development of the second product. Then the second product funded an acquisition of the third product and so on,” Sam says.

But it wouldn’t have happened as quickly without the AusIndustry Entrepreneurs’ Programme. VALD has received support from the program’s facilitators and business mentors, as well as a number of grants.

These included a $539,429 Accelerating Commercialisation Grant received in in 2015. Sam says they had raised their own seed capital to take the product to market. However, with the help of the AusIndustry grant they were more confident they could deliver on their plans.

“We were able to engage some skilled commercial consultants who had engineering skills we didn’t have in house. We were also able to travel to the US and Europe to really open up those markets,” he says.

“We’d been aiming to get our product to market in 10 months. In the end it took us 12 – nothing in the scheme of things, even though it felt like a disaster at the time. But there’s no way we would have been able to do it without the Accelerating Commercialisation Grant, it really was a game changer for us,” Sam says.

VALD now has a suite of products for measuring human strength, power, range of motion, and speed and agility. It has become the market leader for elite sports, including the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the NBA in North America, the English Premier League and the AFL.

VALD has also received other grants from AusIndustry to help develop the business. A $22,000 business Growth Grant in 2020 enabled VALD to invest in advanced business systems to help the company scale efficiently. AusIndustry’s Innovation Connections program also helped the company fund research for new products. Three of these grants totalling $143,000 over three years funded one graduate and two other researchers to work on specific aspects of product development.

“In the early days of the business we couldn’t have afforded to engage with a university. The grants helped us access university research resources. There is published research that references some of our products. It means our products are backed by science and that’s been really valuable”

It has allowed VALD to evolve to the point of offering research grants to others. “We've just announced our VALD Applied Research Initiative (VARI for short), offering $200,000 worth of research funding,” Sam explains. “This will be available in amounts up to $100,000. We're at a point now where we're able to give back to the research community as well.”

While VALD will maintain its focus on developing sports-based products, Sam says in the longer term, allied health is likely to become an even more important part of their business.

“We're talking about physiotherapy clinics, hospitals, things like that. There are a million physio clinics in the world, without counting China or India which are not recognised by the world governing body. We think it’s hundreds of times the size of the elite sports market,” he notes.

They’re already rolling-out new products which might replace some of the time-honoured techniques in common use.

“For example, a physiotherapist often measures strength by getting the patient to push or pull against, say, the physio’s hand. The physio then uses their experience to give it a rating out of five,” says Sam.

“In April 2022 we launched the DynaMo. It’s a new hand-held device that measures this strength and movement much more accurately. It’s on track to be our most successful launch to date. We’re not taking away the skills and the decision-making these professionals have, but we are giving them more accurate numbers to work with.”

Sam says the potential of being able to measure, or quantify, nearly all areas of the human body is enormous. It means that research and development will remain a key to VALD’s business.

“We have at least 50 staff working on R&D at any given time. That’s 30 to 40% of the business. Most of those staff spend time working on products, features upgrades and new products that are aimed squarely at allied health,” he says.?

“We made a name for ourselves in elite sport and it's still our largest market. But allied health is where the vast majority of our focus and effort is going in the future.”

“We've created over 100 jobs in Australia and generated some really valuable intellectual property. Our products are used all around the world. All 20 English Premier League teams and 75% of the major league sporting teams in the US use our products.”