GPS DataViz, a provider of sports performance intelligence software, has rebranded as Whistle Performance and announced a $2M seed round from angel investors.
Whistle Performance works with more than 150 teams across college and the pros, including the NFL’s Steelers, the NWSL’s Pride, Univ. of South Carolina women’s basketball, Texas Tech and Vanderbilt football and League One Volleyball (LOVB).
Founded by Marc Kerrest, a derivatives trader-turned-college soccer coach, the startup’s founding mission was to visualize GPS data sets, as the original name suggested. But the growing firm now ingests more than 80 types of data and applies AI to automate insights, such as flagging asymmetries and predicting training loads in particular practice sessions. The new name harkens to the use of whistles in sports to signal when to start or when stop.
“We started very much just integrating GPS data,” Kerrest said. “Ultimately, we outgrew it, and it just caused some confusion. What we’ve grown into is doing a lot more than that.”
Among the individuals to invest are Hockey HOFer Joe Thornton and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, the brother of the startup’s founder. Marc Kerrest said the decision not to accept venture funding was intentional given the firm’s organic rate of growth.
“That changes the expectations,” Kerrest said of venture investment. “The valuation might be higher, but then you’ve got to hit certain targets.”
Kerrest played soccer at Tufts and was coaching the sport at Colorado College when he realized the need for new software. The team’s strength and conditioning coach, Kevin Cronin, had left the post, and Kerrest inherited the job of building daily reports. Drawing on his mastery of Excel from his days in finance, Kerrest automated several tasks that had been tediously manual. A newer feature, Whistle AI, makes the process even more efficient by allowing natural language search through the data.
Cronin, who later worked with special forces in the military, began collaborating on infusing the sport science knowhow and is now Whistle’s VP/Performance Science. In all, the startup has 14 employees with a strong tech focus to build for users from high school through the pros, support the coaching practitioners at their level of need.
“To develop and maintain those systems takes a lot of time,” Kerrest said. “We’ve got a team of eight engineers who’ve worked at some of the biggest software companies in the world. That’s all they’re working on. And so we can just do that at a high level and then drive the derivatives off of that.”
