Cordelia King was 18 the first time she worked at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground - the one and only MCG - standing at the gate in the orange vest, scanning tickets, watching the crowds pour in. She obviously had no idea at the time that she'd eventually be one of the people building the technology that could change how sport is played at every level below the elite tier.
Today, Cordelia is a cofounder of Superstat: a computer vision platform that turns raw match footage into professional-grade statistics, automatically, for any team at any level. In July 2026, the company closed a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by Blackbird Ventures after completing the Startmate S26 Accelerator, and subsequently announced they were relocating to Austin, Texas, to scale globally.
Not too shabby a career journey for a founder who would self-describe herself as a once risk-averse person who navigated a series of career pivots to take a leap - putting technology in the hands of users who love it, and use it religiously.
Here’s Cordelia’s account of building tech that people love, from what previously didn’t exist:
The Career Zigzag That Led To This Moment
Cordelia's career reads like that of a perpetually curious person. Government communications in the NT. Engagement consultancy in Melbourne. Visualising cancer research for public audiences at the Peter MacCallum Centre. Graphic design across sectors she'd never planned to work in.
"I loved all the subjects at school. When they said pick one thing to study at university, I was like - I don't want to pick one thing. But I liked the flexibility of being creative, which is why I went into design."
The MCG job came through a family connection who runs the G's staff operation: the mother of Carlton (champion) player Jagga Smith, a family friend Cordelia used to babysit. She worked her way from gate operator to the MCC members' level. Sport was always in the background - footy at the family dinner table constantly discussed - but it wasn't yet a career.
That changed when cofounders Kai Bloomfield and Chak Sum (Sam) Hung approached her while building the MVP for Trainstop, a recruiting platform connecting players and clubs. Kai asked if she wanted to do this full time.
“I can be risk-averse person naturally. So I was like, “oh my God!” But then I thought - if there's a time to try it, it's now.”
She joined, and Trainstop grew from under 100 Victorian clubs to over 300, expanded into cricket, and built a community training program that ran 300 kids across Melbourne and Brisbane twice a week (eventually being used by 10K+ athletes) to fund the platform's development.
But it was what happened next that changed the company's trajectory entirely.
Two Rejections, One Pivot, and a Better Product
The team applied to Startmate twice with Trainstop. Twice they were turned away.
“We didn't quite grasp that the vision they were looking for was… you've got to go huge with your market, you've got to go global, this has to impact big-time. The local (AFL) footy market is only so big, and I can probably understand why they turned us away.”
Rather than retreat, the rejections pushed the team to look harder at what they were actually building. They noticed that player profiles lacked one critical thing: real data. And that local-level footage was notoriously difficult to work with.
Sam and Cordelia both had basketball backgrounds. The BBall court is a consistent size. Camera angles tighter, footage cleaner. They tried the computer vision model on their new focus of basketball - and it worked. It worked, very, very well.
Initially, Superstat was simply born as a product add-on to Trainstop. Then it became the main event. The team applied to Startmate a third time, now with basketball traction and clubs already trialling the product. And they (finally) got in.
"We want to power every decision in sport - from the amateur to the pro level, across every sport, so that every decision can be backed by data. Whether that be development, recruitment, who you're putting on, who you're taking off the field."
The incumbent they're going after is Hudl - a manual coding platform generating $750 million a year in revenue. Superstat's pitch: some similar insights, but more elaborate, more cutting-edge, built with computer vision, and without anyone having to consistently touch spreadsheets.
Design. Not a Nice-to-Have. A Moat
Cordelia ships all of Superstat's front-end code and a good portion of the back end. Sam Hung, the technical co-founder, spends 100% of his time on the computer vision model. The division of labour is deliberate - and Cordelia's design background has become one of the company's clearest competitive advantages.
“I think now that anyone can build, it's particularly important to have a background in design. I can design something, drop it into Cursor and say - I need it to look like this. And then I have just enough technical knowledge for the trickier stuff.”
Superstat. Photo c/o Eddie Jim, The Age. Article HERE
Cordelia’s not satisfied easily. Every day she looks at the product and finds something to strip back, simplify, or reconsider. The benchmark she holds herself to is the apps she actually loves using - Airbnb, Spotify, the Apple interface.
“With a lot of code people are shipping agentically right now, you can tell when there hasn't been thought put into the design. There's a million buttons. Everything's happening at once. Putting time into really stripping back that information, making the hierarchies clear - keeping everything the most seamless user experience possible - that's at the core."
The goal is a product the user never has to think about. No wondering where to go next. No friction. Just the game data that is at the core of their value proposition, delivered easily and consistently. And frequently: shared.
Swing Bigger Than Feels Comfortable
The San Francisco leg of the Startmate program was the moment the team's pitch sharpened into something that could land in a room full of US VCs.
“The US market looks for such big vision. You've got to swing. You've got to go big when you pitch to them.”
The early feedback was blunt - the founders were a little too laid back. Maybe, too Australian. They needed to show more obsession, more urgency, and not just more confidence.
“We are obsessed. We just naturally, as Australians, don't want to come across that way initially. So we lifted when we got that feedback, and showed our obsession through data and demeanour. And the story came across a lot better.”
The Funding to Enable Scale
What sold Blackbird - such as co-founder and partner Niki Scevak - on the round, alongside angel backers Jarrod Webb (Blinq) and Alex and Chris Naoumidis (Mindset Health), was the size of the market that professional sport ignores entirely. Elite sport is tracked to the millimetre. The other 99% is run on instinct and memory.
Superstat has already passed $500,000 in annualised revenue - most of it from American basketball teams - without a single staffer yet on US soil permanently. America has roughly 20,000 high schools with basketball programs. Then colleges, where budgets dwarf anything an Australian program can spend. Then the pro pathway, where the spend on finding the next great player is, in Kai Bloomfield's words, "an unbelievable level of investment."
Austin, Texas - with it’s thriving tech scene, University of Texas talent pipeline, and a sport-obsessed state - is where they're taking it next.
Who Helps Scale This
As the team builds out toward the US and beyond - American Football (NFL), volleyball, soccer and baseball models already in development - the question of who joins the mission matters as much as what gets built.
Cordelia's hiring test comes down to three things: passion for sport ("is this something you want to spend the next 10 years of your life doing with us?"), genuine likability ("would you cross the street to walk to work with them, or just see them when you arrive?"), and hunger.
“We want to work with people who are probably too ambitious.”
The vision hasn't changed since day one - just the scope of what's possible. Kai Bloomfield, who cut footage and fetched coffees as a junior analyst at St Kilda Football Club while Champion Data's statisticians logged AFL matches by hand, put it simply:
Do to sport, what Strava did to running.
Every athlete, able to walk off their chosen field, holding their performance data.
Superstat is an AI-powered sport performance platform backed by Blackbird Ventures, built to bring professional-grade statistics to every team, at every level, across every sport. The team is relocating to Austin, Texas as it scales into the US market. Learn more at superstatsport.com
Superstat & myself, at the recent ‘SIGNAL’ event c/o SEEDS, run in collab with Startmate and The Commons. Photo by Evan Lim (thanks Evan!)
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