Scion of a TV dynasty is building a sports tech disrupter in Atlanta

Infinite Athlete is a name fans of Chelsea FC have spent all year reading over and over again. It was the front-of-shirt sponsor for the Premier League power this past season, an advertising opportunity brands pay top-dollar to land — one that can turn a nascent company into a household name.

But Infinite Athlete is not a company offering a consumer good, a rarity for a front-of-shirt sponsor for any team. The company is building what it calls an “operating system for sports” — software that aggregates data collected from disconnected platforms. By using their platform, leagues, teams or other third parties can access data feeding from biometric sensors stuck to players, raw camera footage and real-time stats, among other information, to do whatever they see fit. A coach can analyze player performance, or a developer of a sports betting app could access historical stats.

It’s creating a foundation on which developers and artificial intelligence can build things “none of us can even imagine today,” Ebersol said.

Think of Infinite Athlete like Google Maps. The ubiquitous mapping app combines location data gathered from GPS, Wi-Fi and cell tower signals with information about different navigational routes, traffic conditions and businesses. But the real value of the app is that it organizes all of that disparate data, creating an opportunity for other companies to build on top of it, like Uber, Airbnb and Postmates — all applications that rely on location data.

The National Football League uses Infinite Athlete’s technology. So does Chelsea, the University of Colorado’s football program and the soon-to-be-launched Tiger Woods-co-founded TGL golf league.

Ebersol’s objective in landing the Chelsea sponsorship is like any other company: attracting eyeballs and boosting the brand. And it’s worked. Within six weeks of signing the deal, Ebersol said the company had outreach from every major sports league in the world asking, “Well, what is it?”

Ebersol, 41, moved to Atlanta from San Francisco three years ago with his wife and daughter after spending months traveling around the country in a tour bus scouting places to live. He bought a house on Zoom and launched himself into the business community, taking executives out to lunch and asking them to introduce him to the three most interesting people they know.

He picked Atlanta because it is a hub for financial technology and cybersecurity, and for the region’s pipeline of engineering graduates. The city also is emerging as a hub for fantasy sports and wagering.

Plus, every major sports league is represented in the city, aside from the National Hockey League. The state’s corporate tax breaks in the technology and entertainment sectors were also a compelling draw.

“This culture has all of the pieces,” Ebersol told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “All of the pieces are there, you just need a super node in the middle of it to pull it together.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez

Credit: Miguel Martinez

‘Betting on the jockey’

Peers say Ebersol takes a “swing for the fences” approach to business.” He describes it himself as being “bad at the block-and-tackle small steps, I just go to the big ones.”

Perhaps it’s the function of his background, or perhaps it’s just him — Ebersol speaks in aphorisms and movie quotes. He uses a line from “The Matrix” to convey his belief that everything short of death is survivable, and then quotes Bane, the villain in the “Dark Knight Rises,” to explain his transition into the business of sports: “You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.”

Ebersol is the son of actress Susan Saint James and television executive Dick Ebersol, a former president of NBC’s sports division and legendary producer of Olympic and Super Bowl telecasts. At 13, Charlie Ebersol worked as a gofer during the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, which was his first time visiting the city.

Ebersol studied film in college. During his final year, he was in a plane crash with his father and one of his brothers, Teddy. In the moments following the crash, Charlie Ebersol, who broke his back in two places, pulled his father to safety, but he couldn’t find his brother, aged 14, in the wreckage. Teddy Ebersol died along with two crew members.

In the years following, Charlie Ebersol transitioned to television, creating and producing reality series about human endurance and second chances. He produced two documentaries his other brother, Willie, directed, including one about the Ithuteng Trust school in South Africa that galvanized Oprah Winfrey to donate more than $1 million to the school. He directed one about the first iteration of the XFL, a football league NBC and the World Wrestling Federation formed to compete with the NFL. His father was at the helm of this venture, which ran for a single season.

During this time, Ebersol began working with Atlanta Hawks CEO Steve Koonin, who was then a president of the Turner Entertainment networks. Ebersol pitched several ideas to Koonin, around three or four of which were brought to fruition. Ebersol was always good for an idea, Koonin said. Some of Ebersol’s titles are TNT’s reality television show “The Great Escape,” USA Network’s “The Moment” and the History Channel’s “Off the Grid: Million Dollar Manhunt.”

“A lot of times when you’re buying a show, you’re buying an idea. With Charlie, you’re betting on the jockey, not the horse,” Koonin said. “It wasn’t the best idea I’d ever heard — but you believed in Charlie. You wanted to invest and be in business with him, because you knew he could take an idea and make it better.”

Planting the seeds

The roots of Infinite Athlete were planted in a previous venture: the Alliance of American Football (AAF).

Almost a decade into his television career, Ebersol saw the business model of TV was not as lucrative to an entrepreneur as it once had been. He was used to owning the shows he pitched and licensing them to networks. But quickly it became commonplace for the network to own the show, and he was lucky if he got to hang out on set. So he started to think of ways to move beyond television.

A plan began to form in 2016. While working on the XFL documentary, Ebersol thought to himself: “This sounds like a good business. What am I missing?”

He mulled this over with Tom Veit, a sports executive who served as a general manager of an XFL team. The two then spent a week writing a business plan for a new league.

Ebersol then called up storied NFL executive Bill Polian. Over pancakes at a diner, Polian said: “If you have the money, do it.” So Ebersol pivoted. He launched a minor football league with eight teams — the AAF — with Polian.

AAF had a business wrinkle: Ebersol wanted to develop a proprietary technology to process and deliver real-time data on players to fans through a mobile app. Connecting the data collection with historical statistics and data analysis applications could, in theory, enhance player training, game planning and the fan experience, and it could be used for sports betting.

Plus, instead of just looking to ticket sales and TV rights deals to generate revenue for the league, the AAF could also sell its back-end technology to partners.

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

The league hired former software engineers from Tesla and Lockheed Martin. The inaugural season began in February 2019, and AAF’s app shot to the top of the charts. The league outfitted its players with chips to capture inertial, physical and special data, which was sent to the app.

Three months later, however, the league and its app shuttered, lacking the funding to continue after its controlling owner Tom Dundon pulled out, claiming the AAF was not sustainable.

The league filed for bankruptcy liquidation in April 2019. Business disputes surrounding AAF remain in the courts.

Moving forward

After the AAF shuttered, Ebersol took a year off. He said he went on a diet and lost more than 20 pounds, shedding the mental and physical weight that comes with running an upstart football league. He focused spending his time on his daughter, who was born months before the league started.

But he started to get calls. One was from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who thought Ebersol was onto something with the AAF’s technology.

“He was like, ‘Hey, can we build this together?’” Ebersol said.

He spoke with his longtime colleague Annie Gerhart about continuing the technology in a controlled environment, and focusing on the NFL initially. He pitched the idea to the heads of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who had previously passed on investing in the AAF. The firm said they wanted to lead.

The company, then called Tempus Ex Machina, Latin for “time out of the machine,” raised nearly $60 million in its first two rounds of fundraising from Silver Lake, the Founders Fund and several other firms. It hired an engineering team to develop the software internally, and, last year, rebranded as Infinite Athlete after acquiring injury analytics firm Biocore.

Growth is on the horizon for Infinite Athlete, which had about 70 employees as of June, according to PitchBook, and plans to hire more. The company has spent the last few years building its platform. Now they’re at the stage where they’re opening the technology to third parties.

A challenge for the company is having people understand its capabilities. Infinite Athlete is trying to disrupt an industry that is set in its ways, Gerhart said — one that is extremely lucrative without having to change a thing.

“When you’re saying, ‘But you’re leaving money on the table,’ it’s kind of hard for people to wrap their heads around that when they’re still making quite a bit of money,” said Gerhart, the co-founder and COO of Infinite Athlete.

In Atlanta, Infinite Athlete is expanding its engineering team. It’s hiring graduates from Georgia Tech and Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities, particularly Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College. Infinite Athlete has been in conversation with Morris Brown College, Clark Atlanta and Georgia Tech about creating job training programs for students

The company also signed a contract with one of the five largest sports leagues in the world, Ebersol said, and plans on building facilities in the city solely focused on that league. Ebersol won’t reveal the identity, though it’s not the NFL, with whom Infinite Athlete already has a partnership. The facility will house the company’s performance testing, laboratory and live production work.

The company signed its front-of-shirt sponsorship with Chelsea — a deal worth roughly $49 million, according to ESPN — for only one season. In the upcoming season, they will sponsor the club’s training top sleeve, hoping to further the brand awareness that the sponsorship from this season generated.

“But if our bottom line is an indication of it the last 12 months, pound-for-pound, dollar-for-dollar, it’s been a very, very good relationship for us,” Ebersol said.