The Australian tech company kicking goals at venues around the world
PMY founder Paul Yeomans has quietly built one of Australia’s most influential sports technology firms. Now it is targeting countries like Saudi Arabia.
Paul Yeomans is one of Australia’s best, and little known, sporting export stories.
Yet it’s not what the 42-year-old entrepreneur is capable of on the field of play that matters, but rather what he has done off it.
Behind just about every big stadium in America, from Super Bowl venues to baseball, basketball and ice hockey sites, sits technology run and provided by Yeomans’ PMY Group.
Then there are cricket stadiums, Olympic venues, tennis tournaments like Wimbledon and the Australian Open and big music festivals in Britain like Glastonbury and BST Hyde Park. PMY claims to have a client base of more than 1000 venues, events and sports rights holders.
Next comes big opportunities in fast-growing Middle East markets like Saudi Arabia, where billions will be spent on dozens of new high-tech stadiums in the next decade, including 15 for the 2034 World Cup, and cutting edge technology that will roll out at venues there and around the world.
“The design, delivery and management of technology systems is bread and butter (for us) but the exciting things that are coming are in relation to the data and analytics captured by that technology,” Yeomans says.
“The world of real-time data, artificial intelligence and predictive analysis of what crowds are doing and what they want, and how that ensures the operations of and experience at a venue is world class, that is the future. That’s the next chapter.”
Yeomans is the founder and chief executive of the privately-held PMY, which has quietly raised almost $100m from US investors in the past two years, has more than $150m annual revenue, with compound annual growth rate of almost 100 per cent over the past four years – and, he says, it’s on track to deliver that again in the next four.
PMY has just struck a deal to buy Australian creative firm KOJO, which works at major sporting events, with brands like Wesfarmers and entertainment giants including Warner Bros and Netflix.
That deal should boost PMY’s overall revenue by about 15 per cent and will be officially announced next week, while the company is also poised to raise about $US30m ($45m) from private equity investors in the US by October.
That deal comes a year after a similar raise from New York-based private equity firm Bluestone Partners, which has helped boost PMY’s global workforce by more than 60 per cent in 18 months.
Yeomans, who founded PMY in Melbourne 15 years ago, says he is just getting started.
“We’ve got an aggressive organic growth program. The tide continues to rise in technology – as do the expectations of experience from fans – and so the commercial economy around the live event environment is booming,” he tells The Weekend Australian.
“And our addressable market is huge. The next phase of our growth continues to be North American-led but we also see the Middle East as a huge opportunity. The venue program they are looking to build there over the next 10 years is stratospheric.”
Pointing to spectacular stadiums like the $US5.5bn SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, which cost $US1.9bn to build, Yeomans says the US has led the way in terms of spectator comfort, amenities and technology behind the scenes – or for sound, video, seat ordering or other fan-friendly facets.
“But now for the first time ever there’s a country in Saudi Arabia that is fully equipped to say ‘Well, that’s what’s happening in America but how do we take it up a notch?’ ”
PMY looks after about $US500m worth of technology that underpins big sporting venues around the world – “90 per cent of our business is what people don’t see,” says Yeomans – and makes all the behind-the-scenes processes and procedures work.
“Our team has led the technology design for every NFL venue, from every NBA venue, 90 per cent of Major League Baseball venues, 90 per cent of NHL venues. And we have the next six professional sporting buildings in North America. So right at the highest level we’re leading, end to end, the technology design, at these venues.”
That technology can range from simply making sure of seamless entry for staff and athletes to establishing basic internet connectivity at a cricket-specific stadium built in a New York public park for the T20 World Cup earlier this year, including running the scoreboard, ensuring ticket scanners were connected and everything from digital sponsor boards to point of sales machines was working.
At the recent US Open tennis grand slam, PMY’s Optic software program tracked patrons moving through the New York site and helped organisers adjust queue times at shops and food outlets, helped co-ordinate transport and security when more crowds flocked to particular courts and also oversaw advertising in venues for commercial partners.
PMY also has a deal with the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf tour, teaming with Google Cloud to provide real-time data and statistics for fans, customisable broadcast options and other technology such as 3D aerial overviews of courses.
All of which is a far cry from Yeoman’s first contract, overseeing the installation of some technology to help facilitate online betting at Melbourne’s Flemington Racecourse.
PMY launched as a consulting service, helping venues strike deals like a 2014 contract for the SCG to install fast wi-fi for fans and a customer service platform providing digital video content and consumer offers.
Yeomans consulted to other venues around Australia, including the Australian Open tennis (he rates that as the best-run sports event he has been to) and then later did deals for cricket stadiums in Britain and moved into the US while PMY built its own software and data products.
The business was bootstrapped until Yeomans raised $2m from family, friends and supporters in Melbourne in 2016. Former Qantas chairman Leigh Clifford joined the board, which now includes chairman Ray Wilson, a former Hawthorn footballer and ex-Hastings Funds Management chairman. “That helped us start growing globally and then when Covid hit and we had different acquisition opportunities, we had loyal and committed investors that kept backing us,” he says.
The biggest breakthrough for the company though was the transformative acquisition of Dallas-based consultant Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams in 2021, which brought with it the big US stadium clients. It was a stadium closer to home though that played a big part in the deal, Yeomans explains.
“We met them working on the MCG in 2012. They designed different audio-visual and scoreboard technologies and we were doing a very small piece of work there at the time. But we kept in touch with the owners and worked together and then when they were ready to retire a decade later we were the call they made.”
PMY last year clinched its first institutional investment deal, with the $30m funding from New York-based Bluestone Partners for a minority shareholding. This gives PMY a likely valuation of more than $US200m. Bluestone was founded by Bobby Sharma, a former NBA executive, and raised $US300m to invest in sports, media and entertainment. PMY was its first investment.
That raising, and the pending $US30m deal with an undisclosed US investor, sets PMY up for more expansion Yeomans says. “We have very, very aggressive ambitions over the next five to 10 years. Now we think we have got the expertise, the credentials, the experience, the backing and the market positioning to truly do some great things in the next chapter.”
