Shivaas Gulati, a co-founder of Seattle-based remittance company Remitly, joined the Custodians of Southend United ownership consortium in November 2024. He said he hoped to apply his technology background to both football operations and the club’s business—but the 2024 announcement described ambitions, not technology projects already deployed at Southend.
What Gulati’s Southend United investment involved
GeekWire reported on Nov. 8, 2024, that Gulati joined the Custodians of Southend United as its 11th member, with an investment and a seat on the club’s board. Southend United is based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. The report said the club was founded in 1906 and was then competing in the National League, which it described as the fifth tier of English football; that is a description of the club’s status in 2024, not a statement about its current division. GeekWire’s 2024 report did not disclose the size of Gulati’s investment.
Gulati moved with his family to London in 2022 after more than 11 years building Remitly. After taking time away, he explored how to combine his interest in football with his technology experience. He described the connection simply: “Tech is everywhere,” Gulati said. “Every company uses it in some way or the other. And sports is no different.”
Where he hoped technology could help the club
Gulati’s ideas covered two distinct parts of running a football club. In the 2024 report, these were possibilities he hoped to guide or explore, not confirmed Southend deployments.
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| Area | Use cases discussed |
|---|---|
| On-field operations | Wearables, player and game analytics, scouting, recruiting, and possible support for coaching staff. |
| Club business operations | Personalized fan engagement, commercial opportunities, strategic partnerships, and identifying opportunities in the region. |
For supporter outreach, Gulati said technology could make individualized communication practical: “We can reach every fan individually in a personalized way today that wasn’t possible a decade-plus ago.” The 2024 article also attributed to him an estimate that half a million people lived in Essex County, but did not name a statistical source or reference year. It is best understood as his estimate in that report, not as a current official population figure.
His approach to AI was to experiment, then scale
Gulati framed AI as a tool clubs could test and expand when an initiative demonstrated value. He said it might augment coaching staff or help identify new business opportunities locally: “I don’t have to go out and hire a team of, let’s say, performance analytics, people,” he said. “I can build those things in house and have AI help us to augment our coaching staff or uncover new business opportunities in the region.”
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The same GeekWire report said Gulati and consortium chairman Justin Rees used AI to draft Gulati’s purchase agreement and contracts. That was an anecdote about their process; it does not establish that AI-drafted legal documents are appropriate for other transactions.
Gulati also linked the project to the habits he had developed in business: “The same kind of grit, tenacity, planning and iteration you need in a startup or a tech company, I hope to bring all that to Southend and use that as an advantage,” he said.
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What later Arkero reporting adds—and what it does not
Later reporting connected Gulati’s sports-technology interests to Arkero, a Seattle-area startup he co-founded to help sports organizations manage operations with AI. GeekWire reported on Jan. 29, 2026, that Arkero had raised $6 million in pre-seed funding and had early partnerships across professional soccer, including Southend United. The article said Arkero worked with existing tools and systems, with initial deployments focused on matchday planning and season-ticket renewals. Those are developments reported in 2026; they were not announced as completed Southend projects in the 2024 ownership story.
The 2026 article also reported that Arkero projected more than 50% efficiency savings in matchday planning. That was the company’s projection, not an independently measured result. In a separate report published Aug. 28, 2026, GeekWire described Arkero’s three-month project with Bolton Wanderers to overhaul data infrastructure and develop a club intelligence layer connecting organizational data, systems, and workflows. The report also included Southend among Arkero’s client clubs; the Bolton project itself was not a Southend project.
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- GeekWire’s Jan. 29, 2026 report on Arkero
- GeekWire’s Aug. 28, 2026 report on Arkero and Bolton Wanderers
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