Bill Near

A radar gun for the slap-shot generation

Walk into almost any rink and you'll find the oldest scouting tool in sports still running the show: a coach, two eyes, and a hunch. Bill Near spent his twenties as an engineer and decided that wasn't good enough. HELIOS, the company he founded in 2018, clips a sensor to a player's shoulder pads and quietly counts every stride - speed, acceleration, agility, time on the ice - then hands it back as numbers a 12-year-old can read.

The premise is almost stubbornly simple. Baseball got the radar gun. Running got the stopwatch. Hockey, the fastest game on two blades, still mostly gets adjectives. "Looks quick out there." "Good motor." Near's bet is that the adjectives are about to retire. His sensor needs no cameras bolted to the rafters, no beacons in the boards, no special ice. You put on your gear, you skate, and afterward the app tells you what actually happened - including an automated breakdown of every shift, paired with the video to match.

It is a very engineer-shaped solution to a very personal problem. Near grew up between New Hampton and Moultonborough, New Hampshire, a kid who loved the outdoors and loved hockey roughly in equal measure. At 16, after skating in a New England showcase with real Division 1 ambitions, he ran into the wall every developing athlete hits: he wanted to get better and had no idea, in any measurable sense, where "better" was. Coaches could tell him. Nobody could show him. The gap between feedback and feeling is the entire reason HELIOS exists.

Captain of the team, then captain of the lab

Near went to MIT and did the improbable double: he captained the men's ice hockey team and earned a bachelor's in engineering in 2010, then stayed for a Master of Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science in 2012. That combination - rink leadership and embedded electronics - turns out to be the exact résumé you'd write for someone building a hockey wearable. He just lived it in the wrong order to know it at the time.

Before the sport pulled him back, he built things for other people. He worked with Fortune 500 tech companies on electronics and software, then spent roughly five years helping build the electrical engineering team at ClearMotion, a venture-backed automotive startup. Suspension systems and shoulder-pad sensors don't sound alike, but the underlying craft - tiny sensors, messy real-world motion, machine learning that has to make sense of both - is the same craft. He was, without quite planning it, in training.

When he finally started HELIOS, he did it the lean way. During the prototyping stretch he kept the lights on by consulting around 20 hours a week on electronics and robotics, using his embedded-electronics background to hand-build a demo good enough to convince the first checks to show up. "Lean and mean," is how the early days get described - one engineer, a soldering iron, and a working prototype doing the talking.

Hockey is the hardest sport to measure - and the most desperate for it

Consider what makes the math hard. A skater accelerates, stops, pivots, and changes edges dozens of times a shift, on a frictionless surface, inside a chaotic swirl of nineteen other bodies. The motion that matters most - a crossover that buys half a step, a tight turn that beats a defender - happens in fractions of a second and disappears. Camera systems can chase it, but they live in the rafters of expensive rinks and stay there. The breakthrough Near chased was portability: put the intelligence on the athlete, not the building, so the data follows a kid from a beer-league barn to a showcase arena without anyone installing a thing.

The stakes are not abstract. Families pour serious money into youth hockey - skates, camps, ice time, travel - largely on faith, because progress is so hard to see. Coaches assess with their eyes and players train without a scoreboard for effort. HELIOS reframes the whole exchange: parents get a progress line they can actually read, players get an objective number to beat next week, and coaches get a shift-by-shift ledger instead of a gut feeling. The word that keeps surfacing in how Near describes it is "objective." In a sport long governed by opinion, that's close to radical.

The first checks came from people who'd seen the sport from the top

A hockey-tech company lives or dies on credibility with hockey people, and Near stacked that early. His co-founding partner was Ron Francis - Hockey Hall of Famer, two-time Stanley Cup champion, and now president of hockey operations for the Seattle Kraken. Among the very first investors, alongside Francis, was Near's own former MIT hockey coach. The founding team pulled talent from MIT, the NHL, Intel, Nike and Bauer, which is to say it spoke both fluent silicon and fluent locker room.

That credibility compounded. By the October 2025 seed round, the cap table read like a roster: a syndicate of active NHL executives and players, with Utah Mammoth forward Alex Kerfoot joining Francis. The company has also lined up players including Matthew Knies of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Caroline Harvey of the US Women's National Team and Wisconsin, plus a league partnership with the EHF. When the pros are willing to put their names on your effort score, the effort score gets taken seriously.

An MIT engineer who quotes Gretzky and means it

Near has the rare profile of a builder who's also a believer. Press him on philosophy and you get Wayne Gretzky: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - a line he cites as the thing guiding how he runs at problems. From an engineer, that's less a poster slogan than an operating principle: ship the prototype, take the meeting, build the demo, find out.

He and his wife, Taylor, left Boston after eleven years there to settle on New Hampshire's Seacoast and build their life and company in the same place. HELIOS is headquartered in Portsmouth, a deliberate choice to root a high-tech sports company in hockey country rather than chase a coastal tech address. The vision he describes runs past the rink: HELIOS as the leader in motion-tracked sports analytics, ice hockey first, then lacrosse and beyond, sitting at the crossroads of sports, IoT, big data and machine learning.

There's a tidy symmetry to all of it. The teenager who couldn't measure his own skating grew up to be the person who measures everyone's. The captain who led from the front built a company that hands the front to anyone willing to clip on a sensor and look at the numbers. It's a small device aimed at a big, stubborn idea: that effort, finally, can be seen.

First the rink, then the field

The October 2025 raise is a starting gun, not a victory lap. Near has been explicit that the seed capital points in four directions at once: new performance scores and AI-driven coaching features, growth across both individual players and youth organizations, hiring across product, data science and customer success, and deeper integrations with video providers, training facilities and leagues. The throughline is the same idea that started it - take the kind of analysis that used to live only inside professional organizations and make it ordinary, affordable and everywhere.

Ice hockey is the wedge, not the ceiling. Near talks about HELIOS as a motion-tracked analytics platform that disrupts hockey first and then crosses over - lacrosse is the named next target, with other sports implied beyond it. The bet underneath is that nearly every sport shares hockey's basic flaw: it generates oceans of effort and almost no record of it. If you can put a sensor on a body and teach a model to read human motion, the addressable problem isn't one sport. It's all of them. For now, the work is on the ice, in Portsmouth, one stride at a time - which is exactly where a hockey lifer would want to start.