Indoor climbing is a tricky sport to track. That’s why Spanish startup Lizcore caught TechCrunch’s eye at MWC earlier this year. The team of two co-founders — led by CEO Edgar Casanovas Lorente, a climbing instructor and guide turned entrepreneur — were showing off hardware they hope will see climbing gyms ushering in the kind of social gamification that all sorts of other sports already enjoy, thanks to the rise of wearables and activity tracking apps. 

The system that Lizcore has devised only asks the climber to wear a lightweight fabric NFC bracelet to track their sport, meaning they don’t need to climb with their mobile or another chunky device. The bracelet works in conjunction with smart base units and top-out holds — allowing route stats to be captured and progress mooned over in Lizcore’s app. 

Fast forward a few months and the startup has raised a pre-seed funding round as it works on commercializing its hardware. The team has pulled in a total of €600,000 at this point (around $630,000 at current exchange rates). The funding comes from several investors and business angels, including Startup Wise Guys, as well as individual and business backers from the sector, plus a chunk of state support (in the form of an interest-free loan of €200,000, and some grants). 

They also recently signed their first local customer: a climbing gym called Drac de Pedra in the Catalan town of Rubí, where they held a demo event of the route tracking tech earlier this month. “They want the full installation. But they will start with 30 routes, which means 10 devices,” co-founder and CTO Marçal Juan told TechCrunch. 

While digitizing indoor climbing is still core (ha!) to Lizcore’s pitch, front of mind for the team is finishing work on a safety device for autobelays. Juan says they’re hoping to have this completed in 6–12 months’ time — though he laughs knowingly when TechCrunch repeats the mantra that ‘hardware is hard’ (“yeah, really hard!”), also conceding they’ve had some reliability issues with their route tracking kit which they’re working to iron out, too.

Lizcore’s original team of two co-founders has grown to nine people as they expand efforts to showcase the system, finesse the hardware, and get more gyms interested in buying in.

NFC + AI = autobelay safety uplift

For any non-climbers out there, autobelays are devices that gyms can install at the top of higher climbing routes to allow climbers to ascend without needing another person to belay them. Each one of these mechanical machines contains retractable webbing that is attached to a carabiner which the climber must clip to their harness before they climb in order to do so securely. 

The system is very safe when used correctly. However, there have been instances where climbers have forgotten to clip themselves into an autobelay before ascending — leading to tragic falls. 

Clipping the carabiner to the wrong part of the harness is another big risk. And gyms typically require climbers to obtain a credential (typically in the form of a card they attach to their harness) demonstrating they are au fait with all the autobelay safety features before they can use them. But policing this requires a member of staff on hand continuously checking that each climber has the necessary credential. All too often, that simply doesn’t happen — so there’s a perennial risk for climbing gyms that people who don’t know how to use this equipment properly could get into trouble.

Lizcore reckons it’s come up with a smart way to improve the safety of autobelays and help gyms shrink all these safety risks (and their own legal liability). Firstly, by allowing for credentials to be held digitally on the NFC band which the climber wears for route tracking. With Lizcore’s system, climbers that lack the necessary digital credential would be unable to access the autobelays as a smart locking system would not release the webbing/rope until the correct credential was presented.

The system will also make use of cameras installed in conjunction with Lizcore base units — the same hardware that’s used for route tracking and to display grades etc. — with footage of the climber standing at the start of the route analyzed with AI software to detect whether they are correctly clipped into the harness or not, per Juan.

A second camera facing up at the route itself will be trained to detect whether a climber is climbing without being clipped in — triggering an alarm if so.   

“Our main focus now is on this autobelay security device,” he said, highlighting that there are a number of deaths every year from autobelay accidents. “The security device is a complement of the [route tracking] grader start [hardware]… So we provide security and [gamification].”

On the hardware side, he says Lizcore’s autobelay safety system is being designed to work with various brands of autobelay machine, including newer devices that have retractable rope rather than webbing.

Getting the AI software right is another big focus for the team so it can do a decent job of autonomously detecting when a climber is properly clipped in or when they might not be.

“The machine learning model that it will have will be able to track and say if the climber is completely safe. But the thing is, it’s not that we expect that we will arrive at 100% level of accuracy — we mean that we will provide different stages and different layers of security,” said Juan, pointing back to the credentialing element of the system as another big piece of the puzzle.

“The demand [from gyms] is on the safety right now,” he added. “We are just creating the necessity, in some sense, [for digitizing and gamifying indoor climbing], but the real necessity is avoiding accidents because they are a huge [risk], and there’s people dying, and it’s critical.”