Miami's OnSport AI Raises $2 Million to Spot Athlete Injury Risk Before It Happens
OnSport AI, a Miami-based sports tech startup founded by a former NBA scout, has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding to launch a product that reads player tracking data or plain video to flag injury
MIAMI — Every coach knows the sinking feeling of watching a player go down without anyone touching him. A Miami startup thinks those moments leave clues long before they happen, and it just raised money to prove it.
OnSport AI, which analyzes how athletes move during games to assess their risk of injury, has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by owners of overseas basketball teams, Sports Business Journal reported on Nov. 4. The company is using the round to launch its injury risk product.
How It Works
OnSport’s pitch is flexible inputs. The software can ingest a league’s player tracking data when it exists. When it doesn’t, the company says it can work from any video input to assess the “movement signatures” of players.
From there, the system compares an athlete’s motion with that same athlete’s own baseline over time, looking for deviations. An intelligence layer on top characterizes the risk so coaches and medical staff can decide what to do about it.
That last step is the point, according to CEO Brett Burman. “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 told Sports Business Journal. “And it’s because, when you’re making those decisions, you need something tangible in order to incorporate it.”
The company’s early focus is basketball, but it is expanding into soccer, and a golf product is in development.
Built by Basketball People
The founding team comes from inside the game. Burman is a former NBA scout with the Memphis Grizzlies and served as general manager of the London Lions, which reached the 2024 EuroCup semifinals.
Tech lead Ahmad Ishaq is an entrepreneur who has built in the defense industry and sits on the board of StatusPro, the NFL-licensed virtual reality game. Director of Biomechanics Adam Petway has worked with the NBA’s Washington Wizards and Philadelphia 76ers, with basketball programs at Arkansas and Louisville, and with two professional teams in Japan.
The idea came out of Burman’s time in London, where several of his former NBA players suffered non-contact injuries. His staff could point to signs of fatigue and training load, but those looked like correlations, not causes.
“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 said. “Really, I needed an alarm.”
He and Petway spent more than a year studying film, digging through research and feeding what they found into the company’s AI models.
Petway argues the biggest injuries are not random. “For a lot of the major injuries – ACL tears, Achilles tendon ruptures – there are clear, distinct patterns that are identifiable as to what are the sequence of events leading up to those terminal injuries as well as the mechanism of injuries encountered for those major injuries,” he said. “Real-time feedback is important, but you have to look at the totality and the chronicity of the signature as a whole.”
Early Traction
OnSport is not starting from zero. According to Sports Business Journal, the company has been running a pilot with an undisclosed NBA team for more than a year, and it is working with international basketball and soccer teams as well.
The choice of lead investors is telling. Owners of overseas basketball clubs live with the same problem Burman faced in London: rosters are expensive, seasons are long, and a single serious injury can derail a year. Backing a tool built for that pain point is a natural fit.
Why It Matters for Miami
Miami has spent the past few years building a reputation for fintech, AI and real estate tech. Sports tech is a smaller but natural lane for a city with NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL and MLS franchises, plus a deep calendar of global events.
OnSport’s model also shows a pattern that Miami founders can borrow. The company did not start with a technology looking for a problem. It started with an operator’s frustration, spent a long stretch turning domain knowledge into data, and then built software around a decision a real customer has to make.
The open questions are the ones every early sports-science company faces. Teams will want to see that alerts lead to fewer injuries, not just more dashboards, and that the product works as well from ordinary video as it does from league tracking feeds. With a $2 million round in hand and a pro pilot already running, OnSport now has the runway to start answering them.
For founders watching from the sidelines, the takeaway is simple: in a crowded AI market, the companies that win attention are often the ones that turn data into a clear answer for someone who has to act on it.