Founder Kobi Wu has introduced a new platform offering an unbiased standard for athlete valuations.
Wu is a three-time graduate in higher learning who spent years working in marketing and advertising, helping brands develop customer strategies at the intersection of music, entertainment, and sports. This was especially true when she worked with one of her agency’s clients, Spotify, when music streaming was still unfamiliar. Overhearing conversations among marketing, product, and engineering teams about how best to present the technology shifted gears for Wu.
“It’s not dissimilar than any other engineering or technical business where you are trying to make something that’s super complicated very accessible. That’s my first foray in tech,” she told AFROTECH™ in an interview.
While pursuing an executive MBA at New York University, the idea for her first tech business took shape: VisuWall Technologies, founded in 2014. The company used computer vision to monitor vacant storefronts, track pedestrian traffic, and relay demographic data, such as age and gender, to marketers and advertisers. Wu ran the business for eight and a half years, raised $1.6 million in capital, and exited in 2023.
Cache AI
Wu is now pursuing her next venture, which was inspired by conversations with coaches and trainers who struggled to articulate the factors that should have determined her son’s athletic value when he was in high school. Cache AI is a valuation intelligence platform created to establish a standard for athlete value. According to information shared with AFROTECH™, the platform has collected data on more than 500,000 athletes to inform name, image, and likeness (NIL) valuations; revenue-sharing; and sponsorship decisions.
Cache AI serves three key audiences: athletes; schools and athletic programs; and agencies and brands. Its four specialized tools replace guesswork during partnership negotiations and help athletic programs make data-driven decisions about NIL funding.
Among its offerings are CacheScore, which evaluates an athlete’s scoring performance, visibility, and off-the-court impact, including community service, leadership, and grade point average; and CacheValue™, which combines revenue sharing and NIL to forecast an athlete’s full commercial market potential.
“…Our approach is you have to institute your budget. But if you only have $1 million or if you have $10 million, the ranking of the players stays the same because their CacheScore is first. We’re looking at their performance and analytics … Even if your budget doesn’t allow for certain allocations, at least you know what is fair for that player,” Wu explained.
She added, “In the market, it tends to go the opposite. It tends to go, here’s my budget, so here’s how much a player is worth. In our version, it’s actually athlete first.”
Other tools include:
- CacheShare™ – enables athletic program directors and coaches to make fair, data-driven revenue-share allocations among players.
- CacheNILx – provides deal-level market benchmarks and sport- and position-specific rate cards for athletes.
Wu noted that athletes can create profiles and link supporting content, including game highlights, articles, and press releases, to showcase their performance and accomplishments. Schools and athletic programs can also create profiles through team representatives, such as coaches, general managers, and athletic directors, to access team valuations.
Additionally, brands and agencies can create accounts for their representatives to discover athletes within the ecosystem and make informed decisions about market rates for opportunities such as social media posts and event appearances.
Cache AI has been piloted in more than 40 athletic programs, including the Nike-owned EYBL circuit; conferences and leagues such as the Power Four and Group of Five; and high schools and HBCUs, including Alabama A&M University and Alabama State University, she told AFROTECH™.
“The HBCU circuit has been super helpful for us. … In the NIL space, they don’t have the same funding. They don’t have the same donors, the same endowment to be able to compensate players. … It becomes really important for them to dig deep on the other things that we can bring to the table. And Cache [AI] is one of those platforms,” Wu said.
Cache AI is now raising a $1.5 million pre-seed round with $380,000 raised so far as of this writing. Participating in the round are: former Dallas Mavericks General Manager Nico Harrison, who said he sees the venture expanding to “every sport and every kind of talent”; Bronze Valley Generator Accelerator; Birmingham-based venture capital firm Measured Capital; and angel investors.
Funds will support infrastructure, product development, sales and operations teams, and workshop and marketing efforts with athletes.
“I think about, are the founders intimately connected to the problem they’re solving? … I saw the vision of what she was building,” Measured Capital Founder Douglas Watson told AFROTECH™ during TechBirmingham’s Code the Classic.
Cache AI is available via a mobile web page and is also in beta, with a planned launch on Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
More than 2,700 athletes are active on the platform, according to Wu.
