Brett Burman had players with NBA experience on his roster at the London Lions. What he didn’t have was an answer when some of them started suffering non-contact injuries.
His staff could point to fatigue and training load, but those measures left a gap between knowing a player was under strain and knowing what to do about it.
“There was never an answer as to what was going on with these guys and how do we actually do anything to stop it and to make these guys healthier,” Burman told Sports Business Journal. “Really, I needed an alarm.”
That search became OnSport AI, a Miami-based startup that uses computer vision and machine learning to flag injury risk by analyzing how athletes move. On November 5, the company announced a $2 million pre-seed round led by some undisclosed overseas basketball teams.
For Burman, OnSport’s co-founder and CEO, the goal is to help staff make a decision while there is still time to act.
“People like to give raw numbers and they like to give data, but when you’re sitting in a position where you need an answer, raw data actually becomes significantly irrelevant,” he said. “And it’s because, when you’re making those decisions, you need something tangible in order to incorporate it.”
OnSport’s approach starts with the athlete’s own history. The software compares a player’s movement over time, looking for changes from their usual patterns. It can work with a league’s player tracking data or, when that isn’t available, video.
That makes the central question more personal than whether an athlete’s movement fits a broad standard: Is this player moving differently from how they usually do, and could that change signal a problem?
The company says its software can assess risk during live play and through later review. The aim is to give coaches, medical staff and performance teams information they can use when deciding how to manage a player. Whether those warnings lead to fewer injuries is a separate question, one the supplied reports do not answer with published results.
Burman built the company alongside Ahmad Ishaq, an entrepreneur with experience in defense technology and a co-founder of the NFL-licensed virtual reality company StatusPRO. Founding member Adam Petway, who previously worked in biomechanics for the Washington Wizards and Philadelphia 76ers, leads OnSport’s biomechanics work.
Burman and Petway spent more than a year reviewing film and research and feeding their findings into the company’s AI systems. Their work focused on the movement patterns that can precede serious injuries, as well as what happens at the moment of injury.
“Real-time feedback is important, but you have to look at the totality and the chronicity of the signature as a whole,” Petway said. In other words, one moment on film may tell only part of the story. Changes that build over days or weeks could also matter.
OnSport says it has been working with an NBA team on a pilot for more than a year in addition to various agreements with organizations across the NBA, NCAA, international basketball and professional soccer, although it did not name those partners or share the financial terms.
The new money will support product development, engineering and biomechanics hires, and more sports partnerships. OnSport, which also has an office in Orange County, California, plans to advance its military work as well.
“The same insights that help protect a professional athlete can help protect any worker, whether in the military or the labor sector,” Ishaq said.
Pictured above: OnSport AI co-founders Ahmad Ishaq (left) and Brett Burman (right).
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