A company that makes movement legible
Watch a pitcher uncoil toward home plate. A human eye sees grace. Dorian Pieracci sees a dataset waiting to be born - joint angles, weight transfer, the millisecond a shoulder fires before a hip. His company, MOVRS, exists to capture exactly that, and to hand it to machines that have never quite understood how people move.
MOVRS, which Pieracci co-founded in 2020 and runs as CEO from Los Angeles, takes ordinary video and turns it into structured, labeled 3D data about human shape and motion. No skin-tight suits dotted with reflective markers. No lab. Just cameras, computer vision, and a stack of AI that reconstructs a moving body in three dimensions and tags what it is doing. The company calls the output the quickest and most accurate human biomechanics available for partners who want to build immersive content.
The pitch sounds abstract until you watch where it lands. On a baseball mound, MOVRS data helps coaches see the mechanics that cause an injury before the injury happens. In a broadcast booth, it becomes a 3D digital twin of a live play. In a video game or a betting product, it is the raw material for letting a fan step inside the moment. The thread connecting all of it: humans move, and for the first time machines are being taught to read that movement at scale.
Finding a spot in the value chain
Most founder stories sand the edges off the hard part. Pieracci says the quiet part out loud. Early MOVRS tried to sell its technology directly, and it did not fit cleanly anywhere. So the company stopped pushing and started asking a sharper question.
We had to figure out where we sat in the value chain, so we went to this partner model.
Dorian Pieracci, CEO of MOVRS
The answer reshaped the business. Rather than chase every customer, MOVRS now looks for partners with the technical muscle to build a differentiated product and an executive team it can actually work with. The ideal collaborator brings the domain; MOVRS brings the data and the vision models. It is a humbler position than "we do everything," and a more durable one.
Baseball became the proving ground. MOVRS teamed with NewtForce - led by Kyle Barker and former MLB pitcher Zach Day - to put its vision models to work helping coaches and athletes, including work touching Wes Johnson at the University of Georgia. The goal Pieracci describes is to find that same kind of counterpart in one sport after another, then one industry after another.
Video in, understanding out
Capture
Multi-camera video records athletes in real settings - no marker suits, no lab booking required.
Reconstruct
Computer vision, NeRFs and generative models rebuild the body as 3D shape and motion, then label it.
Deploy
Partners feed the high-fidelity biomechanics into training, broadcast, gaming and immersive products.
Underneath the product sits real research. MOVRS co-founder Abdullah Chand spent more than a decade leading scalable vision technology and built the patented real-time AI system for 3D human movement at the company's core. Lead AI research engineer Syed Safwan Khalid focuses on 3D reconstruction, NeRFs and generative models, with published work on neural networks and signal processing. The team Pieracci assembled is not bolting AI onto a slide deck - it is building the hard parts.
A sports-business mind, not an accident
Pieracci did not stumble into sports from an engineering lab. He aimed at the business of sports on purpose. After an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, he earned a Master of Professional Studies in Sports Industry Management from Georgetown University - a program built specifically for people who want to run the commercial side of the game.
The years between school and MOVRS read like a tour of the sports and digital economy: analyst and institutional sales roles, a stint as Director of Digital Strategy at HumanEquity, and consulting work at ProVentures and DTP Management. By the time he co-founded MOVRS, he had spent a career sitting where strategy meets sport - which is exactly the seat a company like this needs filled.
Recruiting the people who know the data
A founder reveals his thesis through who he hires. Pieracci brought in Sandy Zinn, formerly MLB's Senior Director of Data Operations, as EVP of Strategy, Innovation & Performance - a signal that MOVRS intends to speak the native language of league data. He added Nicole DeFord as EVP of Product and Operations, and built around co-founders Bob Shafron, the Chief Talent Officer, and engineering lead Abdullah Chand.
Nicole's ability to lead up and down with a variety of players and partners is already making an impact at MOVRS as we expand our business.
Dorian Pieracci, on hiring Nicole DeFord
It is a roster assembled for the partner model, not against it - operators who can sit across the table from a league, a broadcaster, or a betting platform and be taken seriously. The vision MOVRS sells is holistic: capture the data, build new content with it, and open up fresh revenue across broadcast production, experiential marketing and sports betting.
Where the data shows up
For a company most fans have never heard of, the surface area is wide. MOVRS describes work and applications touching some of the biggest properties in sport.
A few human details
Ask what he listens to and you get the LightShed Podcast - and a small tell about how Pieracci thinks. He admires the show for covering Roblox, NFL streaming deals and corporate earnings with equal enthusiasm and expertise. That is the same generalist's range a company like MOVRS demands, where one conversation is biomechanics and the next is broadcast rights.
On the accelerator that shaped the company, he is plain about what mattered - not the demo days, but the candor.
The environment the program created was unique. An honest open 'place' that enabled us to learn from partners, mentors, and peers previous wins and failures.
Dorian Pieracci, on Comcast SportsTech
Why this matters now
The timing is not subtle. As AI systems grow hungrier for high-quality, labeled data, the ability to manufacture accurate 3D human movement from plain video stops being a sports novelty and becomes infrastructure. MOVRS frames its purpose as helping both people and AI agents understand how humans move and interact in the real world. Sports is the beachhead. The market is anything that needs to know what a body is doing.
That is the wager Pieracci is making from Los Angeles - that the messy, beautiful, hard-to-quantify thing a human body does in motion can be turned into something a machine can finally read, and that whoever supplies that understanding sits in a very good spot in the value chain indeed.