Boarding Pass
Starting from an Arsenal fan group, Marquee says it’s the "Claude Code" for sports recruitment
With a $2 million Pre-Seed round led by AnD Ventures, Israeli sports tech startup Marquee looks to trounce the sticking points curbing recruitment in professional sports.
“The idea emerged when the founders, lifelong football fans, built early intelligent agents to synthesize public data for an Arsenal supporter community,” shared Marquee, a company producing an AI-native operating system for recruitment departments in pro team sports, listing itself as the first of its kind for recruitment. The quality of the insights from that initial hobby “led club professionals to assume the team had access to ‘inside information’.”
The catalyst to turn this pastime into a serious entrepreneurial pursuit came from the realization that “clubs need a system that contextualizes data against their specific sporting DNA and financial constraints to produce clear, explainable recommendations.”
The platform's infrastructure, according to Marquee, “functions as a force multiplier for staff and automates approximately 70% of manual recruitment workflows, turning weeks of analysis into minutes.”
You can learn more about the company below.
Company Name: Marquee
Sector: Sports Tech
Product/Service description:
Marquee is the operating system for professional team sports recruitment departments, serving as the first AI-native decision engine that solves the "Data Paradox". While clubs are flooded with data from disconnected platforms, most of them effectively use only 4% to 15% of it. Marquee acts as a platform-agnostic hub, consolidating data from any external vendor alongside a club’s private models, know-how, and unique sporting DNA.
Positioned as a "Claude Code for recruitment teams”, Marquee’s agentic infrastructure functions as a force multiplier for staff and automates approximately 70% of manual recruitment workflows, turning weeks of analysis into minutes. Technically, Marquee encodes players as high-dimensional vectors and utilizes transformer-based models trained on hundreds of thousands of match sequences. This allows the system to simulate team chemistry, calculate tactical fit, and provide explainable recommendations via a natural language interface. It enables clubs to save millions on the workforce, using their resources to focus on the sporting decision rather than analyzing endless spreadsheets, which ultimately results in significantly reducing the multi-million dollar risk of failed transfers.
Founder Bios:
Dean Bracha (CEO): Bracha is a second-time entrepreneur with 11 years in business leadership. Bracha leads go-to-market, partnerships, and strategy.
Dror Rosenfeld (COO & Product): Rosenfeld has over 15 years of experience in football, marketing, and tech, including club-side experience. He is also a former sports journalist and scout.
Tal Darchi (CDO): Darchi has been a data scientist for over eight years specializing in building NLP, ML, and AI-driven predictive systems.
Jonathan Hazut (CTO): Hazut is an 8200 alumni and software engineer with over seven years of experience, specializing in AI products.
Year of Founding: 2025
Last Investment Round: $2M
Last Investment Stage: Pre-Seed
Date of Last Investment: 25/02/2026
Total investment to date: $2M
Investors: Lead: AnD Ventures. Participants: Itzik Ben Bassat, Lior Segal (Co-Founder & Managing partner, Horizon Capital), Avishai Abrahami and Omer Shai (Wix), Ami Sirkis (Founder & CEO, 365Scores), Eyal Segal (Venture capitalist, former owner of Maccabi Netanya FC).
Current number of employees: 6
Open positions: N/A
Website: https://themarquee.ai
Social Media: LinkedIn
How was the idea born?
The idea emerged when the founders, lifelong football fans, built early AI agents to synthesize public data for an Arsenal supporter community. The quality of the insights led club professionals to assume the team had access to "inside information." This revealed that while clubs had vast amounts of data, they lacked a "brain" to connect the dots effectively. Direct conversations with recruitment teams confirmed that analysts were drowning in manual work across disconnected tools, creating a clear opportunity for a unified intelligence layer.
What is the need for the product?
Clubs currently face a "Data Paradox": they have access to massive amounts of data but lack the infrastructure to make the best of it. Recruitment teams struggle with disconnected platforms, endless spreadsheets, and manual processes that slow down workflows. This fragmentation leads to a high "miss rate," with over 50% of transfers failing across team sports globally. Clubs need a system that contextualizes data against their specific sporting DNA and financial constraints to produce clear, explainable recommendations.
How is it changing the market?
Marquee is shifting the market from "Data Collection" to "Decision Intelligence". As the first AI-native operating system for recruitment, it introduces LLM-driven search that allows users to query global databases in natural language (e.g. "Find a tall, fast striker with good ball control"). It automates manual work, standardizes analysis, and provides a "one-stop-shop" profile that aggregates technical, physical, mental, and tactical data into one dashboard, dramatically shortening decision cycles thereby allowing scouts and analysts to focus on what they do best: identifying the right talent rather than analyzing endless spreadsheets.
How big is the market for the product and who are its main customers?
The primary customers are professional clubs across team sports, focusing initially on football and basketball, as well as federations, and agencies. Marquee targets a $15B TAM (25% CAGR) across pro sports, media, and outcome markets, having already validated its core product capabilities to deliver predictive intelligence for speculators and scalable insight packs to enhance content for media conglomerates.
Does the product exist already? If not - at what stage is it and when is it expected to hit the market?
Yes, the product is in late-stage closed alpha development. It has already been used by design partners to support real transfer decisions. The official MVP launch is scheduled for the next two weeks, with a pilot roll-out to strategic partners in top divisions in the Netherlands and US following immediately after.
Who are the main competitors in this sector and how big are they?
Marquee is a first mover in the AI-native decision layer, operating above traditional data providers. Therefore, there’s no direct competition and the landscape consists mostly of data providers of different types (wearables, tracking, and human-based data collection).
What is the added value that the founders bring to the company and the product?
The founders combine technological depth with authentic domain expertise. The team includes an 8200 alumni software engineer and a veteran data scientist specialized in NLP and predictive systems. This technical core is balanced by founders with deep industry experience gained from years of working with professional sport organizations, alongside complementary expertise in sales and enterprise go-to-market execution. Their ability to build an "AI operating system that thinks like a scout and analyst" comes from living elite sports around the clock, supported by an advisory board of top industry leaders and collaboration with professionals from leading clubs.
What will the money coming in from the round be used for?
The funds will be used to accelerate R&D and go-to-market as first-movers. Key objectives include:
- Accelerating product development to move from MVP to a mature product.
- Expanding the team in marketing and sales to penetrate key global markets.
- Scaling partnerships with more clubs and data providers.
- Strengthening the AI infrastructure and explainability layers to maintain a two to three year head start over legacy incumbents.
In the "Startup Boarding Pass" section, CTech will cover the (relatively) small investments made in companies during the early stages of their existence - and the entrepreneurs and startups who have not yet had the opportunity to reveal their stories to the world. Please use the linked form and fill it out according to the guidelines. This form is intended for startups raising between $500,000 and $3 million from venture capital funds, angels, or official grants from Israeli and foreign institutions. If relevant, someone at CTech will be in touch for follow-up questions.
