sports-analytics
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The $10,000 Tennis Court Is Now a Phone
SwingVision took the machinery of elite tennis, squeezed it into one camera, and handed the argument over a line call to an iPhone. The trick was not merely teaching a phone to see. It was deciding what ordinary players would actually pay to know.
Smartodds and the cost of knowing more than the market
Matthew Benham’s sports research company turns match observations into betting intelligence. Its £16.6 million revenue tells one story; the people, costs and constant revisions behind it tell another.
Sal Syed Put a Caddie in Every Pocket - Then Took the Phone Away
The Arccos co-founder turned his own stubborn 7-iron, a Yale golf obsession and 1.5 billion tracked shots into a quieter kind of golf intelligence - one designed to make better decisions without interrupting the game.
Betsperts Built a Sports Media Portfolio by Learning When to Leave Good Communities Alone
The Chicago company raised millions to build a social betting app. Its more durable idea was quieter: buy beloved niche sports brands, keep their identities intact and sell useful tools to the fans who already live there.
The Sensor That Turned 1.2 Billion Golf Shots Into a Caddie in Your Pocket
A trio of Yale friends bet that golfers would pay to be measured. A decade and 1.2 billion tracked shots later, Arccos runs the biggest data engine in the game - and the PGA TOUR put its name on it.
The 123-Year-Old Startup That Put a Clock on Baseball
Thirty rival owners, one shared product, and a rulebook that finally admitted the game was too slow. Inside the business behind the batter's-box logo.
Octagon
Octagon works in the control room of modern fandom - negotiating the talent, rights, campaigns, data and live experiences that turn attention into a business.
MOVRS
MOVRS is a San Francisco- and Los Angeles-based AI and computer vision company building vision models that understand how people move and interact in the real world. It turns ordinary video into high-fidelity 3D human data and biomechanical measurements - no bodysuits, no marker dots, no camera arrays - and applies that data to sports storytelling, athlete training, and machine-learning datasets for industries from healthcare to robotics.
Pelotero
Pelotero is a Player Intelligence Platform for baseball and softball that blends computer vision, bat-sensor data, and professional coaching expertise to deliver personalized player development. Using nothing more than a phone video, the app scores a hitter's swing across 50+ mechanical attributes, identifies the gap between current performance and potential, and turns that data into individualized training plans. Founded by former MLB player Chris Colabello and hitting coach Bobby Tewksbary and led by serial software entrepreneur Bennett Fisher, the company has assessed more than 10,000 players and works with 40+ organizations plus scouting service Perfect Game.
Joe Chin
Joe Chin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sparrow, a New York-based sports AI startup using edge AI and computer vision to analyze athletic motion in real time. A 4x serial entrepreneur with 22+ years of leadership experience and three prior exits, Joe built Sparrow around a simple observation: golfers forget lessons the moment they leave the range. Sparrow's flagship golf app has helped 250,000+ golfers analyze their swing against a dataset of 1 million pro golf data points, delivering instant, personalized feedback via smartphone. The company has raised $8.27M in total funding and is expanding into soccer, basketball, and other major sports.
Bennett Fisher
Bennett Fisher is the CEO of Pelotero, a player-intelligence platform that turns smartphone video and bat-sensor data into personalized training for baseball and softball hitters. A self-described 4X tech entrepreneur and category builder, he previously founded and exited Retroficiency (energy analytics, acquired by ENGIE Insight) and Pulsify (people analytics, acquired by Hire Technologies), and served as COO of Paceline. An MIT Sloan MBA, he now applies a career spent making messy data useful to the question of why most young athletes never find out how good they could be.
Bill Near
Bill Near is the founder and CEO of HELIOS, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire sports-technology company that turns hockey development into something you can actually measure. An MIT engineer who captained the school's hockey team, Near pairs an AI-powered sensor that clips to a player's shoulder pads with automated shift video so any skater - youth to pro - can see real numbers on stride speed, acceleration and effort. He built the company in 2018 alongside Hall of Famer Ron Francis, and in October 2025 raised a $2.2M seed round from a syndicate of active NHL executives and players to scale it.
Trace
Trace is an Austin, Texas sports technology company that uses computer vision, GPS sensors and AI to automatically film youth sports games and edit a personalized highlight video for every single player - no camera operator required. Originally founded as AlpineReplay to track skiing and snowboarding, the father-and-son team pivoted to team sports and built one of the largest video datasets in youth athletics. Trace has delivered millions of automated highlights to over a million athletes and raised a $47M Series C at a reported $190M valuation.
PredictionStrike
PredictionStrike is a sports stock market where fans buy and sell shares of professional athletes with real cash. Share prices rise and fall based on how athletes perform against their fantasy projections plus supply and demand. Founded in 2019 by childhood friends Deven Hurt and Brad Chabra, the New York company has raised roughly $16M, counts 275,000+ registered users, and has processed over $140M in lifetime transaction volume across football, basketball, soccer, baseball, hockey, and MMA.
Dan Calpin
Dan Calpin is a senior technology executive and founder who has spent his career at the intersection of AI, media, and enterprise strategy. As Founding Partner and General Manager of Bain Media Lab, he co-created Mensio, an AI-powered analytics platform measuring TV advertising and sponsorships. He went on to serve as President of Hive, the enterprise AI company specializing in content understanding, and later as EVP North America at Incode Technologies. He is currently launching a new stealth AI venture.
TwelveLabs
TwelveLabs is a San Francisco-based AI company building video-native multimodal foundation models that give machines the ability to see, hear, and understand video the way humans do. Its flagship models - Marengo for embedding and retrieval and Pegasus for video-to-text generation - power enterprise applications in media, government, sports, and security, enabling precise semantic search, summarization, and insight extraction from video at scale. With 30,000+ developers on its platform and backing from NVIDIA, Databricks, Snowflake, and In-Q-Tel, TwelveLabs is becoming the standard infrastructure layer for video intelligence.