Relay Ventures backs startup’s plan to close the endorsement “information gap” with AI.
A group of Canadian athletes has teamed up to help sports agencies streamline their operations and make more informed decisions using AI-powered software.
Toronto-based Endo officially launched on Wednesday with 11 sports agencies, including Quartexx Management, Roy Sports Group, KHG Sports Management, and Envision Sports and Entertainment, which cater to multimillion-dollar rosters of clients across the NHL, MLB, and other leagues, and $815,000 CAD in pre-seed funding led by Toronto’s Relay Ventures, Endo co-founder and CEO Michael Boushy told BetaKit in an exclusive interview.
“Agents are still running eight-figure careers out of spreadsheets. Endo gives them the number, and the system to scale.”
John Albright, Relay Ventures
After wrapping up his Western University hockey career, Boushy stayed connected to the sports world by joining a leading talent agency in Los Angeles-based The Team (formerly Wasserman). Boushy spent nearly three years with The Team as a consultant, where he negotiated athlete endorsement deals for brands and learned that the agents on the other side of the table typically relied on instinct rather than hard data, putting them at a sizeable “information gap.”
“Each marketing endorsement was very arbitrary,” he said. That realization, coupled with the insight that these talent agencies still operated in a “quite archaic” fashion, inspired Boushy to join forces with friend and fellow Western alumnus Jack Lavorato (Endo’s co-founder and COO) this summer to tackle these problems head-on. The pair has since recruited Boushy’s former junior hockey teammate, Anthony Baxter, as co-founder and founding engineer, as well as former BMO developer Matteo Tanzi as senior product engineer.
“Everyone wants to understand what their athletes are worth from a marketability standpoint, because it’s never been done before,” Boushy added. “They don’t understand the angles that a brand would typically take in justifying their price point, so we’re helping the agent find the value of their clients.”
Together, they are developing a software platform to help sports agencies modernize their operations that integrates roster management, contract tracking, and deliverable fulfillment into “a single system of record.”
Endo is also building an underlying proprietary AI valuation engine, called endodeals, that measures incoming endorsement offers from brands against media equivalency and anonymizes comparable contracts to help agents assess what their clients’ marketability and these proposals are truly worth.
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“We want to become the benchmark for fair market value in the name, image, and likeness-endorsement ecosystem,” Boushy said.
Relay bought into that vision—and the Endo team’s firsthand experience in this space—via its pre-seed round, which closed in July and was raised via simple agreements for future equity.
“Talent has never been worth more, and agents have never had less time and resources at their disposal to prove it,” Relay founder and partner John Albright told BetaKit over email. “That’s the gap we believe Endo closes.”
Sponsorship spending in Canada rose 17 percent year-over-year, to $4.7 billion in 2025. A significant portion of those dollars flowed towards sports. But Boushy said many agencies still operate their businesses manually across a combination of messy, disparate spreadsheets, contracts, email chains, and memory, which can lead to missed payments, deliverables, and undervalued deals.
Boushy claims Endo’s current platform can save agents as much as 10 to 15 hours a week by centralizing all of this data and making it much easier to parse. While Endo is starting with athletes, Boushy sees potential for its tech across the talent ecosystem, from actors to celebrities, influencers, and musicians.
Feature image courtesy Endo.
