The Player Intelligence Platform that turns a phone video into a hitter's scouting report - and measures the distance between who a player is and who they could be.
There is a peculiar inefficiency at the center of amateur baseball, and it is this: everyone has an opinion about how good a young hitter is, and almost nobody can measure it. A coach watches a swing and says "load your hands." A parent films it on a phone and posts it to a group chat. A scout scribbles a grade on a clipboard. The data exists - it is in the video, in the bat, in the box score - but it is scattered across a thousand phones and never assembled into anything a 13-year-old can actually use.
Pelotero is a bet that this scatter is a business. The company builds what it calls a Player Intelligence Platform for baseball and softball: you take a slow-motion video of a swing on a phone, the app applies computer vision and bat-sensor data to it, and out comes a Hitter Potential Score - a single number, 1 to 100, assembled from more than fifty mechanical attributes. Bat performance. Swing plane. Depth and length. Swing direction. Body mechanics. The pitch you always hear is that data replaces the coach. Pelotero's pitch is the opposite: the data gives the coach a memory.
That line is doing a lot of work. It is, if you squint, the entire investment thesis. The movements are already being captured - on phones, on sensors, at showcases. What did not exist was the layer that turns capture into intelligence. Pelotero is trying to be that layer, and it has convinced some people who know software - the co-founder of Okta among them - to fund the attempt.
The founding story has a nice symmetry to it. Chris Colabello is the on-field credibility: a hitter who spent seven years in independent baseball - seven, a number most players would find clinically insane - before finally reaching the majors with the Minnesota Twins and Toronto Blue Jays, finishing a fifteen-year career with more than 1,500 professional hits. Bobby Tewksbary is the pedagogy: a hitting coach who owned a training facility and has worked with players of every age and level. And Bennett Fisher, the CEO, is the part that turns a philosophy into a company - a serial entrepreneur who has founded, grown, and exited multiple venture-backed software and data-analytics businesses.
What is unusual is the rest of the roster. Most startups hire salespeople who know how to sell. Pelotero hired Mike Olt, who played nine seasons in the majors and used to run sales for Chandler Bats. The customer-success lead is Colabello himself. When your staff has spent its life as the exact customer you are selling to, the product tends to make sense in ways a spreadsheet cannot fake.
Former Twin & Blue Jay. 15-year pro career, 1,500+ hits. Seven years in indy ball first.
Hitting coach and former training-facility owner. Author of the "don't make outs" philosophy.
Serial founder of venture-backed software and data-analytics companies.
Software and architecture engineer with leadership roles at multiple venture-backed startups.
9 MLB seasons with the Rangers, Cubs, and White Sox. Former head of sales at Chandler Bats.
Former college player, trained by the founders. Runs content and social for the company.
The clever thing about the Hitter Potential Score is that it makes an intuition explainable. Every coach already grades swings - they just do it in their heads, in words, and never the same way twice. Pelotero encodes that judgment so it is repeatable and, crucially, trackable over time. You can see the score move. You can see which of the five indicators moved it.
Phone video + computer vision + coaching expertise, combined into individualized development for baseball and softball players.
A 1-100 grade built from slow-motion video and bat sensors across 50+ mechanical attributes.
Breaks a swing into its component indicators so players can target one specific thing at a time.
An iOS feature to track pitch recognition, swing decisions, timing, and accuracy from actual at-bats.
Five indicators, weighted into one number. Illustrative breakdown of a sample swing.
Tewksbary's coaching thesis is almost annoyingly simple, and the company built a product principle out of it. The greatest hitters of all time - the GHOATs, in the house shorthand - were not obsessed with home runs or exit velocity. They were obsessed with not making outs. Everything Pelotero measures ladders up to that: a swing is good insofar as it helps a hitter avoid the one outcome that ends an at-bat badly.
It is a useful anchor for a data company, because it keeps the metrics pointed at outcomes rather than at vanity. A prettier swing that makes more outs is a worse swing. That is a harder thing to measure than bat speed, and it is roughly the reason Plate Intelligence exists - to connect what the swing looks like to what the swing actually does at the plate.
The investor list is the tell. Frederic Kerrest did not co-found Okta because he loves baseball; he backed Pelotero because he recognized the shape - a large, fragmented market with no shared data layer and an obvious wedge to build one. Sports development, viewed from the right angle, is enterprise software wearing a jersey. The money is aimed at the same thing every vertical-SaaS company aims money at: capturing more of the data, and getting into more of the institutions that already own the athletes.
A new iOS feature to track and analyze in-game hitting - pitch recognition, swing decisions, timing, and accuracy - connecting mechanics to real at-bat results.
The company closes its seed round and formally launches the Player Intelligence platform.