W-S sports tech company F5 Sports continues to fundraise, now with newly patented pitchLogic system

WINSTON-SALEM – F5 Sports, Inc., the maker of a technology-enabled baseball that can assist athletes reach optimal performance, has been issued a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for its pitchLogic™ system.

The company announced the news in a statement earlier this week.

According to the company, the newly issued patent is titled “Method, Apparatus, and Computer Program Product for Measuring and Interpreting Metrics of an Athletic Action and an Object Associated Therewith” and provides coverage for “measuring athletic throwing actions, such as the characteristics of a baseball during the wind-up, release, flight, and catch of a pitch sequence across a wide variety of throwing activities.”

Jeff Ackerman, the company’s CEO, told WRAL TechWire in an interview that the company has also recently added a new feature to the system to enable baseball pitchers to assess each of their pitch types, and has a new product in the works that the company will soon release.

The company raised $2.1 million in 2020, and an additional $1.4 million earlier this year.

Ackerman confirmed to WRAL TechWire that the company continues to fundraise on the existing round, noting that there are people within each of the 30 Major League Baseball organizations who use the company’s pitchLogic™ system.

“There is always funding available for good projects and investments,” said Ackerman. “In the sports tech industry, as long as players have a competitive nature, there will be demand for products like ours.”

W-S sports tech startup spins out $1.4M fundraise, more coming

Sports tech for baseball players

The company’s product uses sensors inside of the pitchLogic™ baseball that are connected to a mobile device via Bluetooth. When in use, the system can perform thousands of calculations per second, the company statement notes, and can provide a user data like spin rate, speed, horizontal movement, last point of touch at release, backward and forward extension, and more.

“Our goal is to enable athletes at all levels of play to improve their performance by filtering down the richest set of data available outside of a biomechanics lab to the two or three metrics that represent their greatest unique opportunities for improvement,” said Ackerman, in the statement. “All pitching and throwing technologies provide you with data, some better than others, but none tell you what to do with the data or how to use the data to improve your skills.”