sports-tech
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Erik Vank Is Editing the Waiting Out of Sports
A smart lamp, a 2 a.m. hackathon idea and one very sociable pitch night led Erik Vank to a harder question: why does the clip that matters still arrive after the moment has passed?
Tony Knopp Found a Business in a Drawer Full of Unused Tickets
A forgotten stack of Mets tickets revealed a costly corporate blind spot. Tony Knopp turned it into TicketManager - then spent nearly two decades learning that the harder system to build was his own leadership.
Dylan Robbins
Dylan Robbins is the founder and CEO of Lucra, a New York-based company that gives brands a white-label software kit for running peer-to-peer, real-money gaming and competitions inside their own apps. A former Goldman Sachs and AQR analyst with a Stanford MBA and a Duke undergraduate degree, Robbins started Lucra in 2019 with co-founder Michael Madding after the two spent years informally tracking sports wagers with friends. He pivoted the company from a consumer app to a B2B2C SDK in 2023, and in 2026 raised a $20M Series B led by ARK Invest - the fund's first lead investment in a non-AI startup.
Alex Kerr
Alex Kerr is the CEO and founder of Trajektory, a Chicago-based sponsorship analytics platform he started in 2020 to fix the broken, incomplete data that sports rights holders and brands relied on to value their partnerships. A former baseball player at Kenyon College and business intelligence leader at Monumental Sports & Entertainment, Kerr built Trajektory's first product in Tableau before turning it into an AI-driven platform that now tracks more than $180 billion in annual sponsorship value and works with roughly half of the major professional teams in North America. In May 2026 the company raised $8 million to expand its engineering, sales, and AI capabilities.
Victorien Tixier
Victorien Tixier is the co-founder and CEO of ScorePlay, a New York-based sports-tech company whose AI platform ingests, tags, and distributes the flood of photos and video that pro teams generate every game day. He built it after an internship at a five-a-side soccer chain turned into a home-grown video-recording business, then a first company called Hydra, and finally ScorePlay in 2021 with engineer Xavier Green. By 2025 more than 300 sports organizations - from the NBA and Premier League to the NWSL - ran their media operations on it, and the company raised a $13M Series A backed by Giannis Antetokounmpo, Alex Morgan, Nico Rosberg, Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, and Harry Stebbings' 20VC. Tixier and Green made the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 Sports list.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
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.
Chris O'Dowd
Chris O'Dowd is the co-founder and CEO of WIN Reality, an Austin-based virtual reality training platform for baseball and softball hitters. A former professional catcher who played six seasons in the minor leagues after starring at Dartmouth, he built WIN Reality with his father, longtime MLB executive Dan O'Dowd, to close the gap between practice speed and real game speed. The Meta Quest-based product lets players face game-speed pitching from a library of thousands of real pitchers, and is now used by youth players, more than 200 colleges, and a majority of MLB franchises. The company raised a $45M+ round led by Spectrum Equity in June 2022.
Lewis Burik
Lewis Burik is the co-founder and CEO of DubClub, a Chicago-based platform that connects amateur sports bettors with vetted professional handicappers, or 'cappers,' through subscriptions delivered by text, email, and Discord. A former Stanford inside linebacker who walked on to the Cardinal, Burik started DubClub in 2021 with two college teammates after watching a friend struggle to find trustworthy betting picks online. The company has since grown to roughly 1.5 million fans, crossed $95M+ in lifetime GMV, and raised a $7.5M Series A led by Renegade Partners in 2024, turning a fragmented corner of the creator economy into a profitable marketplace.
Nan Wang
Nan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Sleeper, the fantasy sports platform built like a group chat that grew to millions of daily users almost entirely by word of mouth. He left a private equity career in Hong Kong to build a sports product that is social at its core, turning a 20-year fantasy league among childhood friends into a company backed by a16z, General Catalyst, and athletes like Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. Under Wang, Sleeper expanded from fantasy football into the NBA and fantasy esports, drawing an unusually large share of women and casual fans to a category long dominated by ESPN and Yahoo.
Vicente Fernandez
Vicente Fernandez is the co-founder and CEO of SportsManias, the Miami company that turned officially licensed sports emojis and augmented reality filters into a fan-passion business. A University of Chicago football player turned media entrepreneur, he started the company at 19 after a phone call from his mother and co-founder, Aymara Del Aguila. He went on to ship the first officially licensed NFL player AR stickers in partnership with TikTok and the NFLPA, land on Forbes 30 Under 30 for Sports, and get invited to the White House as an Emerging Global Entrepreneur.
Ari Daie
Ari Daie is the founder, CEO and president of FEVO, a New York social-commerce platform that turns the lonely online checkout into a group activity. After a career that ran through Goldman Sachs, two startups he built and sold, and a senior dealmaking seat at Ticketmaster/Live Nation, Daie built FEVO on a simple bet: people would rather buy tickets and merchandise together than alone. The platform now powers more than 750 partners across the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, MLS and Formula 1, and FEVO has reported scaling past a billion dollars in sales while raising tens of millions in venture funding.
David Overmyer
David Overmyer is the CEO of Raw Engineering, a San Francisco-based digital product and cloud engineering firm that built Contentstack - now the world's leading headless CMS - and the DfanX sports fan engagement platform. A California-certified CPA with a career spanning auditing, CBS Interactive, and CFO roles at Bunchball and Thismoment, Overmyer joined Raw Engineering's orbit as CFO of Contentstack in 2017, steering its transition from a bootstrapped services company to a high-growth SaaS venture. Since 2018 he has led Raw Engineering as CEO, overseeing engagements for clients including the Miami Heat, Sacramento Kings, American Airlines, and VMware.
Wen Miao
Wen Miao is the co-founder and CEO of Lava.ai, a San Francisco-based company building real-time AI-powered customer engagement and loyalty platforms for sports teams, entertainment venues, and enterprise brands. Before Lava.ai, he was SVP and GM at TIBCO Software, where he led global client services and launched real-time predictive customer engagement platforms. Lava.ai counts Real Madrid, the LA Rams, the Sacramento Kings, and the Cleveland Browns among its clients, and has raised over $33.7M in funding. In 2015, Computerworld named Miao a Premier 100 IT Leader.
Max Blacker
Max Blacker is an Investment Analyst at LDV Capital, a venture firm focused on visual technology and computer vision. A former professional soccer player who played for Crewe United FC in Belfast's Northern Irish 4th Division, he turned a leave of absence from Brandeis University into a founding moment - launching SETGK, a goalkeeper glove company that became one of the fastest-growing brands in the space. He holds a BA in Business from Brandeis and an MS in Finance from Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business, where he also kicked field goals for the football team and was a Global Finalist in the 2024 Venture Capital Investment Competition. At LDV Capital, he focuses on the intersection of visual technology with sports, health, and nutrition.
Nick Woodman
Nick Woodman is the founder and CEO of GoPro, the action camera company he built from a rubber band and a wrist-mounted 35mm film camera during a 2002 surf trip in Australia. After two failed dot-com startups, he turned a frustrated attempt to photograph himself surfing into one of the world's most recognized camera brands. GoPro went public in 2014 at a $2.25B valuation, making Woodman briefly the highest-paid CEO in America. Despite a severe post-2015 downturn, he remains at the helm, having waived his salary, personally invested $2M in company stock, and launched the Mission 1 camera line in 2026.