He built a camera that knows which kid is yours - and finishes the edit before you reach the parking lot.
At a youth soccer game, the most anxious person on the field is usually the parent holding a phone. They are not watching their kid. They are filming, and missing it. David Lokshin's company exists to free that parent's hands. Trace mounts an autonomous AI camera on the sideline, follows the play, and then - this is the part that matters - sends each player their own personalized reel of the moments they were in. No one has to remember to hit record. No one argues over the good angle.
Lokshin runs Trace as co-founder and CEO. The product is deceptively simple to describe and stubbornly hard to build: computer vision that can tell one twelve-year-old in a jersey from ten others, stitch the clips, and deliver them automatically. Trace has raised somewhere around $71.8M through a Series C, employs roughly 130 people, and works out of Austin while Lokshin keeps a base in Los Angeles. The legal name on the paperwork is still AlpineReplay, Inc., which is the whole origin story hiding in plain sight.
He does not talk about it as a camera company. "We all have those memories and moments that we're passionate about and we care about, and what Trace does is we deliver those moments to you," he says. "We think of Trace as the creator and keeper of memories." The camera is the means. The keepsake is the point.
The first version had nothing to do with soccer. In 2011, David and his father Anatole launched AlpineReplay, a free app that turned a GPS phone into a black box for skiers and snowboarders - speed, distance, vertical drop, airtime, and which trails you actually rode. David ran the company and the product. Anatole supplied the brains underneath: he had spent decades on GPS and sensor algorithms, including a stretch as CTO and VP at Magellan Navigation going back to 1993.
The data piled up fast, and in strange ways. Within two years AlpineReplay had logged 460,000 skier days across 1,400 resorts in 43 countries - five billion vertical feet skied, two and a half million jumps taken. Some of what they learned, they never went looking for. "We're learning things that we never set out to learn, like which trails are most skied, so resorts know where to deploy grooming and snowmaking," Lokshin said. He was honest about the limits, too: "I'm not sure anyone knows how to make the best use of this data yet. That's one of the caveats of new technology - it's a trial and error process."
In 2014 they shipped hardware: the Trace sensor, a small water-resistant puck that bolted onto a ski or board and could auto-edit your GoPro footage. The Kickstarter pulled in $161,000 in 45 days. Then came the pivot that defined the company - away from action sports and into team sports, where the same problem (capture the action, find the person, deliver the clip) had a far larger field of anxious parents and ambitious kids.
Life becomes much easier when you accept that everything is your fault.
We think of Trace as the creator and keeper of memories.
We're learning things that we never set out to learn, like which trails are most skied, so resorts know where to deploy grooming.
I'm not sure anyone knows how to make the best use of this data yet. It's a trial and error process.
Before sports tech, he traded foreign-exchange options for Barclays in Singapore. Volatility, just a different kind.
His co-founder is his dad. Anatole Lokshin built GPS and sensor algorithms since 1993, including a run as VP at Magellan Navigation.
The company's legal name is still AlpineReplay, Inc. - a fossil of the snowboarding years.
His favorite advice came from his mother in junior high. It is also, conveniently, decent startup philosophy.
The original Trace was a tiny black puck that clipped to a ski and quietly edited your GoPro footage for you.
He has a Harvard applied-math degree and spends his days thinking about a 12-year-old midfielder's best touch.
The long bet is that the sideline camera is only the first place memories get made and lost. Lokshin talks about Trace eventually reaching beyond the pitch - vacations, the moments that scatter and fade - capturing them automatically and handing each person their own version. The camera was never the company. The keepsake was.