AI-driven sports technology pitch draws interest from Mark Cuban

Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, alongside its AI Strike Team, has launched the Forge to Field AI Pitch Competition, with a $1.75 million prize pool focused on AI applications in sport and performance environments. Six finalists were selected from nearly 100 applicants across more than ten US tech hubs, with solutions ranging from AI-powered video analysis for sports operations to neuromuscular sensing wearables, injury prediction systems and AI coaching tools for racket sports.

The startups pitched in a Shark Tank-style showdown to a high-profile panel of “sharks”: Mark Cuban; Ed Stack, executive chairman of Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker; Deap Ubhi, director and global head of solutions architect for startups at Amazon Web Services; Jeanne Cunicelli, executive vice president of UPMC and president of UPMC Enterprises; Will Allen, former NFL player and co-founder of Pittsburgh-based investor MVP; and Troy Demmer, president and co-founder of Gecko Robotics and general partner at First Order Fund. The competition sits inside “Draft Week” in Pittsburgh, turning CMU’s Robotics Innovation Center into a magnet for leagues, investors and technologists who see elite sport as a live testbed for AI. Alongside cash, finalists are competing for up to $1 million in AWS credits, plus strategic backing from investors such as UPMC Enterprises and First Order Fund.

Carnegie Mellon’s AI competition shows that the next wave of sports tech is being incubated in university and medical ecosystems, where biomechanics, injury analytics and AI coaching tools are built with clinical validation and cloud infrastructure from day one. For investors and rights holders, it’s a curated deal funnel: instead of backing vague “AI for sport” plays, they can target narrowly focused products with clearer use cases across both high performance and adjacent sectors like healthcare.