Training and wellness company Exos, having acquired Infinite Athlete and its subsidiary, Biocore, is betting that the tech and expertise used by the NFL to improve player performance can scale to maximize corporate workforce health, too.
The NFL has leaned on Biocore’s engineering research team to study everything from helmets to shoes. Biocore founder Jeff Crandall joined the NFL’s head, neck and spine engineering subcommittee in 2015. On gamedays, Infinite Athlete’s FusionFeed technology helps the league sync video and other data inputs as part of the NFL operations team’s back-end system. Before acquiring Biocore in 2023, the company was known as Tempus Ex Machina, with funding from high-profile investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Endeavor.
NFL EVP Troy Vincent has reportedly told college leaders interested in improving their own setups that, “I would not do anything without moving forward with Tempus.”
Now, Exos founder and president Mark Verstegen wants Fortune 500 executives to hear a similar message.
Verstegen has been working with elite athletes since the 1990s, and Exos has applied its system to U.S. Navy and Special Forces personnel since 2006. It then expanded its focus to corporate wellness clients. Exos says it serves more than 1 million workers today.
“The consumer today is exactly like the athlete was 30 years ago,” Verstegen said in an interview, with various doctors, fitness devices, nutritionists and trainers offering siloed pieces of advice. “Our job is to come in, bring it all under one roof, make it personalized.”
Still, elite athletes remain at the core of the company’s focus, with more than 1,000 NFL draft prospects trained since 1999. Verstegen has also served as the NFL Players Association’s director of performance and contributed to recent studies organized by the league and union. One such project last year, which saw Biocore and Exos experts researching how cleats and surfaces interact to determine what elite football players need to perform at their best, got the ball rolling toward an acquisition, according to leaders on both sides of the deal.
Verstegen highlighted Infinite Athlete’s computer vision-based motion capture technology as a potentially valuable new mode of data gathering for sports entities but also for individuals and groups of workers who could be monitored over the course of their shifts to better identify injury risk factors.
“To be able to start to create that complete continuum of expertise and technologies, it’ll be a little lift, but there’s nothing like these three things coming together,” he said. “We do believe that that should not be exclusive to the NFL, that we should be able to democratize performance, health and safety.”
Exos and its new acquisition are backed by private equity firms BDT & MSD Partners and Madrone Capital Partners. Financial terms were not disclosed. Infinite Athlete’s previous investors also include the NFLPA.
Infinite Athlete founder Charlie Ebersol said the company had received other acquisition inquiries in the past two years. Exos’ pitch stood out because of the company’s existing network of clients and its expertise in turning data and biomechanical understanding (IA’s two biggest strengths) into actionable recommendations for users.
“I could have spent the next three years trying to get to 1/10th of a percent of their existing client base,” Ebersol said.
Ebersol will serve as executive chairman of the new company with a focus on developing new business applications for the combined capabilities. Crandall will continue as CEO of Biocore. Their work with the NFL will move forward as well.
“We want to continue to make them our sort of No. 1 priority,” Crandall said. “But I think one of the things that we want to look at is: Exos … makes us better at understanding how athletes perform and how to keep them safe. And so we would hope to leverage some of that knowledge and skillsets and information to better serve the NFL.”