Bryson DeChambeau just bought a Bellevue tech startup. The professional golfer led a group of investors in an eight-figure acquisition of Sportsbox AI, a swing-analysis platform that uses smartphone video to coach golfers.
The deal closed Tuesday, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Sportsbox’s roughly 30 employees are staying and the brand continues under its own name. Neither side disclosed terms, but DeChambeau told Bloomberg it was an eight-figure transaction.
Before DeChambeau won the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, he had a problem with his swing. He loaded up Sportsbox AI on his phone, found the miss, fixed it, and then told the world about it at the winner’s press conference. Tuesday he bought the company.
How Sportsbox AI turns your smartphone into a 3D swing coach
Sportsbox was founded in 2020 by Jeehae Lee, a former LPGA Tour golfer, and Samuel Menaker, a former Amazon and Voicebox Technologies engineer. Golfers record their swings on a smartphone and the software returns biomechanical measurements, analytical feedback, and a 3D animation of the swing. Coaches can send students annotated screen recordings with voiceover notes on how to improve their swing (or continue doing what they’re doing right).
“We’re building something that brings real coaching to anyone with a smartphone, not just elite players,” DeChambeau said in a news release.
Sportsbox is rolling out SAMI (Sportsbox AI Motion Intelligence) an AI coaching assistant built on Google’s Gemini models. Instead of just showing you biomechanical data, SAMI talks back. It reads your swing numbers and tells you what to fix, in plain language, like a coach in your pocket.
DeChambeau’s other bets: Source Golf, two U.S. Opens, and LIV Golf
The day before the Sportsbox deal closed, DeChambeau joined a small group backing Source Golf, a YouTube network with private equity billionaire David Blitzer as the primary funder.
DeChambeau won the U.S. Open in 2020 and again in 2024. His whole brand runs on analytics and distance — he had the “Scientist” nickname long before he started buying companies. He moved to LIV Golf in 2022.
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