Rewiring Tennis with AI

On a stage designed to mimic Shark Tank, three engineering seniors stepped forward with a deceptively simple idea: what if your tennis racket could coach you?

At the Forge to Field AI Pitch Competition, a national showcase for scale-ready sports tech, startups competed for slices of a $1.75 million prize pool, including up to $1 million in cloud credits from Amazon Web Services. The judging panel had heavy hitters, anchored by billionaire entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Ed Stack, the Executive Chairman and Chief Merchant of DICK’S Sporting Goods. The event was hosted during NFL draft week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Geronimo Carom, Mario Cruz, and David Hershenson, all seniors in electrical and computer engineering, presented their startup, ServeSense. Their pitch: a hardware-software system embedding a compact sensor directly into a tennis racket, capturing high-resolution swing data in real time.

“Metrics that are usually reserved for elite athletes, like angular velocity, impact timing, and racket face orientation, can now be available to the novice player,” explains Hershenson.

Wearables in sports are not new, most live on wrists, chests, or shoes. By moving the sensor directly into the racket, the point of contact between athlete and ball, ServeSense is targeting a richer signal with less inference. Synced with an app, it will then deliver personalized drill recommendations based on the athlete’s data.

“It’s a subtle but important shift,” says Carom. “In tennis, marginal gains matter. A few degrees of racket angle can mean the difference between a baseline winner and a shot into the net. ServeSense aims to quantify those margins, and then teach players how to control them.”

The startup secured a potential $125,000 investment offer from First Order Fund, alongside additional financial interest from both Cuban and Stack, though the exact figures were not disclosed. In the context of student-founded startups, it’s the kind of early validation that can shift a project from a capstone experiment to a venture-backed company overnight.

ServeSense sits at the intersection of two accelerating trends: the consumerization of elite sports analytics and the embedding of AI into physical equipment. Where previous generations of athletes relied on video review and human coaching, the next wave is real-time and personalized.

“If ServeSense can deliver on its promise, it could reshape how players learn,” says Cruz. “Not just at the pro level, but everywhere tennis is played.”

The Forge to Field panel judges included:

• Mark Cuban, Entrepreneur and Investor
• Ed Stack, Executive Chairman and Chief Merchant, DICK’S Sporting Goods; Foot Locker
• Will Allen, Founding Partner, Magarac and former Pittsburgh Steeler
• Deap Ubhi, Director and Global Head of Technology for Startups, AWS
• Troy Demmer, Co-Founder and President, Gecko Robotics and Co-Founder and General Partner, First Order Fund
• Jeanne Cunicelli, President, UPMC Enterprises; Executive Vice President, UPMC