Congratulating Jeehae Lee and Sportsbox AI on their acquisition

When Friends Build the Future Together

There's a version of venture investing that's purely transactional. You find a promising company, you wire capital, you wait. That version has never been the one we're interested in at Hickory Falls Ventures.

Today, we're celebrating something much richer than a return.

Sportsbox AI — the AI-powered 3D motion capture and kinematic coaching platform co-founded by Jeehae Lee and Samuel Menaker — has been acquired by a group led by professional golfer Bryson DeChambeau. Alongside the acquisition, the company announced SAMI (Sportsbox AI Motion Intelligence), a new agentic AI assistant powered by Google Cloud's Gemini models that transforms any smartphone-captured swing into personalized, real-time coaching. You can read the full announcement here.

We are proud investors. We are even prouder friends.

The Founder We Saw Coming

My co-investor on this deal was my best friend, Daniel Jang. Daniel and I met Jeehae at Yale when we were all students there. Even then, it was clear she was exceptional — not in the generic way people say that about ambitious students, but in the rarer, harder-to-articulate way where you sense someone is genuinely building toward something.

What came next was a remarkable journey that shaped everything Sportsbox AI would become. Jeehae didn't go straight from campus to a startup. She went to the LPGA Tour. She competed professionally in one of the most mentally and physically demanding environments in sports — a world where your livelihood hinges on fractions of a degree in your swing, where feedback loops are slow and coaching is expensive and access is stratified. She learned, from the inside, exactly what was broken about athletic training.

That's the founder insight that doesn't show up in a pitch deck. You can't manufacture it. Jeehae had lived the problem.

When she co-founded Sportsbox AI, she brought that experience to bear alongside Samuel Menaker's deep AI engineering background. The result was a company built on real craft: patented 3D motion capture technology that turns a smartphone camera into a biomechanical analysis tool — the kind of capability that was previously locked behind six-figure equipment and elite training facilities. She was democratizing access to elite coaching, and she knew exactly who needed it because she had been one of those athletes.

She also knew how to build a network that validated the mission. Watching her bring in Michelle Wie West as an investor and advisor — a major champion who understood the coaching gap from the same lived experience — was a signal. This wasn't celebrity endorsement. This was product market fit expressed in who wanted to be in the room.

And then Bryson DeChambeau, the most analytically obsessed professional golfer of his generation, didn't just partner with Sportsbox AI — he acquired it. That outcome is not accidental. It is the direct consequence of a founder who understood her technology, her market, and the kind of operator-investors who would eventually want to own it.

Why Daniel and I Invested

When I reached out to Jeehae to ask if we could invest, I was watching a founder who had already cleared every bar I care about. She understood the customer because she had been the customer. She understood the buying psychology because she had navigated it as a professional. She was building with a technical co-founder whose depth complemented her domain expertise. And she was doing it with intellectual seriousness — not noise.

Daniel and I investing together added another layer of meaning. We've been close friends since our Yale days, and finding investments where we can partner has always been something we've wanted to do more of — not out of sentimentality, but because we think better when we think together. Doing that while supporting a mutual friend who was building something genuinely worth building? That's the intersection of capital, friendship, and conviction that doesn't come around often.

We had the privilege of advising Jeehae through parts of this journey — not in ways that changed the trajectory, because she didn't need us for that — but in the way any founder benefits from trusted people in their corner. Watching her navigate the hard moments and the scaling moments with consistency, clarity, and grace only deepened our respect.

The Bigger Signal

At HFV, we invest in intelligence deployed into the physical world. We're drawn to companies that embed AI into high-friction, real-world systems where the barriers to entry are high and the deployment gap is real.

Sportsbox AI fits that thesis perfectly, even in a domain most people don't associate with industrial AI. The body is a physical system. Athletic motion is a physical process. For decades, understanding that process required expensive equipment, elite trainers, and proximity to the right institutions. Sportsbox built the software layer that collapses all of that — making 3D biomechanical insight accessible to any golfer with a smartphone.

SAMI takes it further: an agentic AI that doesn't just measure, but coaches. One that can hold a conversation about your swing, adapt to your goals, and deliver prescriptive guidance in real time. That's the pattern we believe in — not AI as a passive data collector, but AI as a capable operator working within a complex physical domain.

Bryson's acquisition of Sportsbox AI validates this in the most concrete way possible: the most data-obsessed player in professional golf chose this platform to power his vision for accessible, intelligent coaching. That's the right person making the right bet.

Congratulations, Jeehae

This milestone belongs to you and Sam and the entire Sportsbox team. You built something real, from genuine insight, with real discipline — and now you've earned a partner in Bryson who will take it to another level entirely.

Daniel and I couldn't be prouder to have been part of this chapter. And honestly, we're even more excited for what comes next.

Here's to founders who live the problem before they solve it. Here's to friends who build boldly. Here's to Sportsbox AI.

— Andrew Chen, Managing Partner, Hickory Falls Ventures