We turn the cameras chess clubs already have into live broadcasts of every physical game: position, moves and PGN for each board. No sensor boards and no per-board hardware.
Raising $1M pre-seed. 45 boards broadcast at once · 595 viewers in one day · in weekly use at Israel's largest club.
Dov Porat festival, Sukkot 2026; broadcast-site analytics, 27–28 September (86 min: 271 viewers, 28 Sept).
Chess.com and Lichess broadcasts depend on DGT sensor boards, so only elite events are streamed. Weekly club and youth games are almost never broadcast.
Board detection, piece recognition and temporal reasoning validated against the rules of chess produce the live position, move list and PGN for every board.
An ordinary overhead camera sees several boards; nothing is added to the tables.
Each board is located and straightened; every square is classified frame by frame and the move is detected.
The position and move list go live on the web. Spectators followed 45 boards at once this way.
Steps 02 and 03 show the same moment of a real game, Ramat Gan club.
On-premiseA box in the venue, next to the cameras.
CloudGPU inference in the cloud with a central spectator site for the audience.
Our design partners are clubs in Be'er Sheva, including Israel's largest, Ramat Gan and Rehovot.
3 clubs · 50+ cameras · 100+ boards · 10+ servers
Demand is pulling. Other Israeli clubs have asked us to install the system, and the Israel Chess Federation youth committee wants it for the national championships.
Organic audience. 271 viewers followed one tournament on 28 September, 86 minutes each on average (median 22).
A data engine that compounds. 50+ cameras in live clubs feed the training set; ~1,000 newly labelled boards went into the 28 September model.
Viewers stay. 161 viewers watched for over an hour on 27 September.
~200 FIDE federations each run clubs, rated tournaments and youth championships, and every event is a per-board licence. Clubs are our wedge, not our ceiling.
Clubs are design partners today; this is the go-to-market plan. A club's cost grows with its hall, not with hardware, and organisers can license a single weekend.
| Plan | Boards | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Small club | 10 | $350 / year |
| Standard club | 25 | $750 / year |
| Large club | 50 | $1,250 / year |
| Tournament licence | any | $100 + $10 per board |
A 25-board club: $750 a year.With sensor boards, the same club would buy and maintain hardware for every one of its 25 boards.
One 45-board festival: $550.A single weekend licence ($100 + 45 × $10).
No hardware on the tables at any tier. A $5/month player subscription is planned.
A founding team from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
18 months to 100 club subscriptions and 200 event licences, starting in Israel and moving on to the FIDE federations. At scale, 1,000 clubs alone = $750K ARR, before any event licence.
Michael Fire, Oren Freifeld and Andrey Lavrinenko, Ben-Gurion University
founders@chessboards.liveMomentum: the Israel Chess Federation youth committee wants it for the national championships; other Israeli clubs have asked to install it.