Sports-Tech Startup Marquee Raises $1.2 Million to Help Clubs Avoid Billions Lost on Failed Player Transfers

Marquee’s AI platform consolidates and contextualizes sports data, enabling recruitment teams to make faster, smarter, and more reliable player decisions.

Marquee, a sports-tech startup building an AI-powered decision intelligence platform for professional clubs, has completed a $1.2 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by AnD Ventures, with participation from Avishai Abrahami and Omer Shai, founders of Wix; Ami Serkis, Founder and CEO of 365Scores; and venture capitalist Eyal Segal, former owner of Maccabi Netanya Football Club.

Marquee develops an advanced AI platform designed specifically for recruitment, scouting, and performance analysis teams in football and basketball, with plans to expand into additional team sports. The platform unifies all of a club’s data, both from leading global data providers and internal club systems, into a single intelligence layer that generates clear, contextual, and explainable recommendations tailored to each club’s unique playing philosophy, constraints, and objectives.

Globally, sports clubs invest an estimated $60 billion annually in player transfers and contracts, alongside an additional $4.5 billion spent on technology, data providers, and scouting personnel. Despite this investment, recruitment decisions are still largely driven by fragmented tools, siloed data, and manual processes. As a result, more than half of all player transfers ultimately fail to meet expectations.

Positioned as a “Cursor for recruitment teams,” Marquee multiplies the impact of scouts and analysts, dramatically shortening analysis cycles, eliminating manual grunt work, and allowing teams to focus on higher-level judgment and decision-making. By automating and streamlining 70% of existing recruitment and analytics workflows, Marquee helps clubs uncover overlooked talent and reduce the multi-million dollar “misses” defining the modern transfer market.

Marquee is currently developing its platform in close collaboration with 20 professional clubs from top divisions across Israel, Europe, and the United States. For several of these clubs, Marquee has already supported real recruitment decisions during recent transfer windows. The newly raised capital will be used to accelerate product development, launch the first MVP in the coming weeks, and expand marketing and sales efforts in key global markets.

The company was founded in 2025 by Dean Bracha (CEO), Dror Rosenfeld (CPO), Tal Darchi (CDO), and Jonathan Hazut (CTO). The founding team brings together deep experience across enterprise sales, marketing, data science, and AI software development, alongside years of hands-on involvement in professional sports environments.

The platform was built in collaboration with leading scouts, analysts, and sporting directors from top clubs across the globe, as well as with key industry figures such as Javier Sobrino, PhD, formerly Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer at FC Barcelona.

Dean Bracha, Co-Founder and CEO of Marquee, said: “Professional team sports have undergone a data explosion over the past decade, moving from scarce information to an overwhelming volume of data. Even the most well-resourced clubs struggle to process it efficiently, avoid costly mistakes, or consistently identify market opportunities. Marquee is built to be for scouts and analysts what Cursor is for developers: an AI-driven intelligence layer that multiplies their capabilities, accelerates decision-making, and significantly reduces risk and waste in the transfer market.”

Adi Gozes, Managing Partner at AnD Ventures, added: “The global sports-tech market is growing rapidly, with over $30 billion in mergers and acquisitions in the past year alone. Player recruitment represents tens of billions of dollars annually, yet decision-making remains slow and fragmented. The Marquee team brings together exactly the right mix of technological depth and domain expertise to transform how clubs operate, enabling truly data-driven recruitment at scale.

Credit: Mor Shauli