Catapult Sports is an Australian company that makes wearable performance-tracking devices for athletes. It was founded in Melbourne in 2006, growing out of a partnership between the Australian Institute of Sport and the Cooperative Research Centres aimed at moving performance measurement out of the laboratory and onto the field of play ahead of the Athens Olympics.
A Catapult unit, typically worn in a vest between the shoulder blades, combines GPS or local positioning with inertial sensors - accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers - to capture how far, how fast, and how explosively an athlete moves. The raw signals feed analytics that quantify training load, fatigue, and sport-specific actions such as accelerations, decelerations, and collisions. That data is what lets sports scientists and coaches manage workload and reduce injury risk rather than guess at it.
By the company’s account it now works with more than 5,500 elite teams in over 100 countries and across 40-plus sports, including organizations in the NFL, English Premier League, MLB, NHL, AFL, and NCAA. Catapult is publicly listed in Australia and is a foundational supplier in the athlete-monitoring market that injury-forecasting systems build on top of.