July 24, 2025
Meet Nyla Pollard, former school athlete and founder & CEO of the game-changing AI platform, Ballin AI.
A former school athlete-turned-entrepreneur is celebrating the $500,000 angel spherical she just lately closed for her groundbreaking sports activities tech firm.
On July 23, Nyla Pollard, a Faculty of William & Mary alum and former standout defender on the ladies’s basketball staff, introduced on LinkedIn that she formally closed a $500K angel spherical for her AI-powered sports activities platform, Ballin AI. The startup makes use of synthetic intelligence to assist gamers and coaches refine their abilities and improve staff efficiency, in the end reworking how athletes practice, play, and get recruited.
“We’re backed by an unbelievable group of early believers fueling our mission: to make recruiting sooner, smarter, and data-driven for each athletes and coaches,” Pollard wrote.
Pollard developed the idea for Ballin AI after commencement, drawing inspiration from her personal school recruitment journey, which sparked the concept.
“I bear in mind reflecting by myself recruiting course of and considering, ‘Oh, this might be higher,’” she instructed her alma mater in January. “However I didn’t actually begin engaged on it till November of 2022, and we formally included our firm in 2023.”
“Actually, it got here from having that firsthand expertise as an athlete,” she added. “My preliminary thought was to concentrate on the recruiting course of and the best way to make that higher for coaches and gamers. Then, once we dove into buyer discovery and market analysis, we actually landed on the best answer for proper now.”
Launched earlier this yr, Ballin AI automates recreation movie evaluation for coaches and gamers at each degree. Customers merely add their footage, and the platform generates detailed studies tailor-made to their wants.
Coaches can use it for recruiting, participant analysis, and scouting opponents, whereas gamers get insights to sharpen their abilities and enhance their visibility to recruiters and scouts. Now with a employees of 13, together with former William & Mary Tribe gamers, Bianca Boggs and Dani McTeer, Ballin AI is seeking to remodel the way forward for sports activities recruiting.
“As a result of we’re an AI-powered platform, it permits us to ship with unprecedented velocity,” Pollard mentioned. “When you consider it, we’re including automation to processes that had been previously guide and laborious.”
Apart from breaking boundaries as a Black lady in sports activities tech, Pollard can be making waves as a school athlete turned entrepreneur. Final December, she spoke to present student-athletes at her alma mater, inspiring them together with her journey and fervour for innovating the sports activities business.
“In my expertise as a pupil athlete, we might have post-graduate conversations, and the introduced choices had been at all times Company America, grad faculty or taking part in abroad,” she mentioned. “Entrepreneurship was by no means mentioned as a viable profession path. I by no means even thought of doing that.”
Pollard continued. “Athletes have such a singular but untapped perspective on the earth of sports activities innovation. Former athlete founders do exist, however I believe there needs to be extra as a result of nobody is aware of the area like we do. Even after we began Ballin, I bought the query so many instances: ‘Why doesn’t this exist already?’”
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