New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 300 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series.
Company name: Perch
Founder(s): Jacob Rothman, Nate Rodman
Headquarters: Cambridge, MA
Website: http://www.perch.fit/
1. What is your elevator pitch?
Improving performance in the weight room is critical to improving performance on the field. Strength and conditioning exercise increases strength, enhancing playmaking ability, and improves mobility and motor control, decreasing the likelihood of injury. Strength and conditioning coaches are actively looking for technology that can quantify the speed, power, and form of their athletes in the weight room, ensuring efficient and safe strength gains. Perch uses 3D cameras attached to weight racks to collect this data without changing the weight room workflow.2. Problem & Solution
Varsity coaches and athletes expect strength coaches to run a strength program that leads to fast, efficient, and safe strength gains, putting these athletes in the best position possible to win games. However, it is difficult to optimize workouts and ensure safety when coaches have an incomplete view of the athlete’s health. Confounding variables and unknowns such as sleep, nutrition, academic workload, playing time, looming injuries, and more make it difficult for these coaches to design and implement an optimal program for each athlete. How do these coaches maximize an athlete’s physical potential and keep them safe while controlling for these external stressors?Our product is composed of a 3D camera, display, and small computer that are all effortlessly attached to any weight rack. While the athlete lifts, the 3D camera tracks the athlete and barbell. It records and instantaneously displays important metrics such as sets, reps, velocity, power output and form. Athletes and coaches can access the data via a web and mobile application after the workout.
Perch enables Velocity Based Training (VBT), which allows coaches to put these unknowns (sleep, nutrition, work load, etc) in a black box and utilize velocity as a feedback mechanism. VBT improves safety, preventing athletes from lifting weight that is too heavy for a given day. It gives the coach a metric that he or she can utilize to analyze day to day fluctuations in athlete performance, enabling quick actionable insights. It increases motivation by providing immediate feedback and a platform for daily competition. It ensures that every rep is a quality rep, being performed in a way that will bring success on the field. Perch is providing an affordable, accurate, reliable, and easy-to-use system that every coach and athlete can utilize to realize the benefits of velocity based training.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Perch is currently focused on strength and conditioning in the sports performance market. We hope to provide value to the over 1,000 college athletic programs, over 120 professional programs within the top major professional sports (NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL), and over 25,000 high schools nationwide.However, need for improved fitness tracking technology extends beyond the sports performance market. When installed in a commercial weight room setting, Perch can be used to improve performance and safety of experienced and novice lifters alike. Perch can increase training specificity, monitor lifting form, analyze trends in lifting data, host and facilitate competitions with other athletes, and share data with coaches and friends. We believe Perch can be a tool used by the over 11 million Americans regularly performing weightlifting exercise, and encourage millions more to try strength training and experience the positive benefits.
Finally, Perch will not be limited to barbell exercises. We envision our product tracking dumbbells, kettlebells, and joints. Cameras allow our technology to scale across movements and markets, providing value in a variety of athletic settings.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
We sell the hardware at a one-time upfront cost to schools and sports programs, and additional software services at a recurring cost. We plan on instituting a tiered pricing framework so all programs, high school, colleges (DIII, DII, and DI), and professional can accelerate the performance of their athletes while keeping them safe regardless of their budget.5. Management Team – with titles
Jacob Rothman - CEO and Co-FounderNate Rodman - CTO and Co-Founder
Jordan Lucier - Lead Software Engineer
6. Financial Needs: are you currently looking for investment? Have you raised investment already? If so, who are your investors?
We are currently raising a seed round to help accelerate our product development efforts. If interested in learning more please contact jacob@perch.fit.We are still developing our technology. MIT, Harvard, and Boston University are currently beta testing prototypes. However, we are always looking to integrate more feedback into our product development process. If you think you have some valuable insights or would like to beta test, we encourage you to reach out to us via our website: www.perch.fit or email contact@perch.fit.