With the Dallas Cowboys billing themselves as “God’s team” and Friday nights finding people packing into multimillion dollar high school stadiums, Texas is a football state. But with the need for social distancing amid the pandemic, it is uncertain when or if fans can come back to watch teams battle it out on the gridiron.
However, a Dallas sportstech startup is helping athletes hone their catching skills without the need of a teammate.
“We started off as being just engineers who liked a cool project, but this became our life and really working to make this the most consequential piece of training equipment,” Igor Karlicc, co-founder of Monarc, told NTX Inno.
Monarch is a robotic and IoT startup incorporating AI and football. The company has developed The Seeker, a robotic quarterback that can punt, kick and launch a perfect pass at up to 65 miles per hour. The Seeker can operate in manual mode, throwing the ball to a desired location and body position, or robotic mode, which, using a wearable device can track a player’s movement on the field and throw a pass directly to them.
“This was a side project for a while, until it became very apparent through our initial prototypes how much athletes really needed this,” Karlicc said. “We never really played football, the inspiration for us was once we got it in front of the people who want it the most, their reactions… got us fired up.”
What started as a passion project to help a University of Iowa walk-on, is now becoming a tool used by major teams like Southern Methodist University and Louisiana State University. Karlicc and co-founder Bhargav Maganti launched the company while working with the university’s team. At the time, they would work out of a rented house during the day, then testing their tech while the team trained in the evening. Karlicc said in a typical training, receivers would do their strength training, footwork drills and other practices, then hopefully have time at the end to catch a few balls. With The Seeker, he said teams are able to increase the efficiency and repetitions possible during practice. And it can be used by individuals to build on their training at home.
“As people who were formally on the outside of what this means for football practice, there’s no way that this would have been possible,” Karlicc said. “For all these receivers, the biggest innovation is they haven’t been able to do any of this before.”
In late 2017, after going through about nine iterations of the product, Monarc found a metal fabricator in North Texas to start tooling parts for their robot. Finding a region with deep football ties, from the high school to professional level, along with a transportation network that had access to airports and highways, and a climate where they could test their technology outdoors year-round, Monarc moved to Dallas in 2018.
“It was within maybe the first week of us being down in Texas that we saw McKinney’s high school stadium going up… and it was just like, okay this is the place we need to be,” Maganti said.
Then in 2019, Monarc landed a $700,000 investment, according to the Dallas Business Journal, to take The Seeker to the market. Later that year, the company was working with SMU, the University of Virginia and other Big 10 and SEC teams.
And with the Covid-19 pandemic forcing players to find ways to train outside of the team setting, Monarc is currently seeing an uptick in business. When NTX Inno caught up with Karlicc and Maganti they were on the road back from Atlanta, where they had just dropped off a Seeker for Falcon’s wide receiver Mohamed Sanu. And a quick scroll through their social media feeds show players from teams across the country, like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Denver Broncos and Green Bay Packers, using the tech on the field and in their back yards.
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“We’re enormously mission oriented to empower the athletes… because we get a lot of enjoyment out of seeing them use this thing that we’ve been developing for such a long time,” Karlicc said. “Right now, our entire team is really excited that we’ve taken it to this point.”
Now, Monarc is looking to capitalize on the enthusiasm. The five-person team is looking to scale its size and is planning to add new features to The Seeker. The company hopes the recent attention and its focus on customizable customer service will help attract more individual customers and football franchises to take interest in their product.
“This idea, because it’s so novel, grows with us,” Karlicc said. “A lot of things change day-to-day and week-to-week, but if we come in every single day and do the grind and we stay focused, we’re confident.”
