Manchester-based fan engagement company Piing is aiming to put its interactive games at the “greatest events on Earth”, from packed football stadiums to major live experiences beyond sport.
Led by CEO Gareth Langley, the business creates large-scale crowd games designed to help rights holders and brands engage audiences in real time, using smartphones to create shared moments in venues and public spaces.
“It’s the most exciting job I’ve ever had,” Langley told BusinessCloud at Web Summit.
“We have technology that can make a stadium full of fans jump up and down and wave their arms in the air and it’s just the best feeling in the world.”
From a 30-player game to 55,000 fans
Langley says Piing’s breakthrough came after an unexpected opportunity with a huge local football club, which pushed the company to think at stadium scale.
“We were involved in a thing called the Manchester City startup challenge,” he says.
“They loved our 30-player games and asked if it would be possible for us to make one for 55,000.”
That moment helped shape the business case for brands, with Piing aiming to go beyond familiar sponsorship formats.
Langley continues: “Compared to the usual run of the mill brand activations, we thought that what we could do is basically take the logo off the big screen and put it into the hands of 10,000 people, and create an emotional engagement between the brand and fan.”
Premier League to pop-up cinemas
While the company works with top-tier sports organisations, its product range spans both major and smaller events – and it doesn’t stop at sport.
“We do quite a lot of work in women’s football, working with four Premier League teams at the moment,” he says.
“We’re also running a couple of pilots with some massive international football federations.
“Outside sport, we are at The Printworks in Manchester and we’re running a great project Adventure Cinema, who have pop up cinemas all over the UK.
“They were using our products over the summer. We’ve seen fantastic engagement there as well.”
ASCEND
Piing is also part of GM Business Growth Hub’s ASCEND programme, which Langley says has arrived at the right moment for the business.
“I wasn’t aware of it last year (2024-25), but it is definitely right for us this year (2025-26),” he says.
“I think last year I might not have gotten most out of it.
“We’re in a position now where the business is really starting to take off with working with some of the biggest brands and rights holders in global sport, and now it’s just the perfect time to be actually taking that step back from the day to day and just thinking about that bigger picture of what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re going to do it.
“The peer bonding has been wonderful and getting to know the other people on the cohort better, and that shared knowledge and learning – all the conversations that you have that you just don’t have at the same level on a Monday morning in Manchester.
“When you are spending time with people that become sort of very dear friends, these are people that you can ask for anything, and vice versa at any point for the rest of our lives.”
A global business from Manchester
Despite being a small team, Langley describes the business as international by default.
He explains: “We’re a small team, but 60% of our work happens outside of the UK, and 20% of it’s in the US, and the rest of it, most of that, is in Europe.
“We are a global company. Even though we’re small, we consider ourselves a global company.”
‘The most fun I’ve ever had’
Langley says the emotional reaction to live crowd participation is a major driver for the team.
“One of my co founders was down at Trafalgar Square for a project we did with McLaren in the summer,” he says.
“There were 3,000 people in Trafalgar Square, all screaming and shouting for one of our games. It was just magical.
“We just make the world more fun and that’s good, right? To make people happy.”
The danger of end goals
Piing has growth ambitions, but Langley says the company’s mission matters more than a fixed destination.
“Our overall mission is to engage fans of the greatest events on earth,” he says.
“What we love about that mission is that it’s both achievable and completely unachievable at the same time.
“Life is a journey. Business is a journey. There’s always going to be opportunities.
“I think end goals can be quite dangerous.
“Goals are useful for driving direction, but they shouldn’t be the purpose. The purpose needs to be better than an end goal.”
However, there is still huge ambitions for himself and his team.
“We are aiming to be in everything from the Super Bowl to Taylor Swift World Tour and everything in between,” he says.
“So everything in sports and everything out of sports.
“We’re focusing on sport because that’s where we started, but that’s just one of the verticals.
“Products can go anywhere from cinemas to cruise ships to anywhere where there’s a crowd.”
Using AI, but staying human
Piing is already using AI “on an hourly basis” across “development, creativity and production”, and is also exploring AI with clients.
“One client is looking at using AI presenters for running our game show product,” Langley says, outlining a path that could eventually include AI writing scripts and quiz questions, though he adds it still needs oversight: “At the moment, that’s still a slightly manual process and you want to have that human side in between as well.
“That is obviously critical at this stage. We can’t let the AI just do its own thing. We’re not there yet.”
Langley believes that if AI reshapes work at scale, the experiences that make people feel human will become even more important, and Piing is positioning itself right at that intersection.
“That’s going to be live performance, that’s going to be music, it’s going to be sport,” he says.
“It’s about bringing people together, to have those shared experiences.
“That’s where we see ourselves fitting – right in the middle of that.”