OnSport AI raises $2M to turn player movement into injury alerts
What's the deal? OnSport AIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a Miami-based startup that applies in-game biomechanics analysis for injury risk, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by owners of overseas basketball teams. The company compares an athlete's motion to their baseline over time to detect deviations, then characterises the risk to help coaches act.
What's the endgame? OnSport can ingest a league's player-tracking data or, when that is unavailable, ordinary video. It has an early focus on basketball but is expanding into soccer and golf.
Why now? OnSport has spent more than a year piloting with an undisclosed NBA team, plus international basketball and soccer sides. The idea came from chief executive officer Brett Burman's time running the London Lions, where several ex-NBA players suffered non-contact injuries and staff could only point to correlations. "Really, I needed an alarm," he said.
The founding team pairs sport and tech credentials. Burman is a former NBA scout with the Grizzlies; tech lead Ahmad Ishaq sits on the board of NFL-licensed VR game StatusProDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →; and director of biomechanics Adam Petway has worked with the Wizards, 76ers and two pro teams in Japan.
How it works: Burman and Petway spent over a year analysing film and research to train the algorithms. "For a lot of the major injuries — ACL tears, Achilles tendon ruptures — there are clear, distinct patterns," Petway said, adding that real-time feedback matters but "you have to look at the totality and the chronicity of the signature as a whole."
What could go wrong? The raise and pilots are not evidence that OnSport's assessments actually prevent injuries. Validation and team uptake will be the real tests.
The signal: The $2 million round is a small early-stage bet in a growing athlete-analytics category — in April, movement-analysis startup GameRun raised $4 million for a comparable product. OnSport's edge may be that it works from existing tracking data or plain video, lowering the hurdle to adoption.
Read more: sportsbusinessjournal.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
