Swish Basket, the AI sports-technology company building the connected basketball court, today announced US$3.2 million in pre-seed funding raised to date, and the launch of its Seed round, which is now open. The pre-seed was led by Aristagora VC, which holds a board seat, with participation from Peter Kadas, Nika Capital, and RGE Group.
The funding will support Swish's first commercial installations internationally, expand its sensor and AI engineering team, and launch its US marketing and community building. The announcement follows Swish's selection into the NBA Launchpad 2026 Program in January. The NBA is a Swish partner.
Swish's AI sensor mounts above the hoop and uses cameras and lidar to track every shot for accuracy, arc, and mechanics, with instant feedback, no wearables, and no setup.
At the heart of the platform is Swish's advanced computer vision technology, enabling facial recognition and real-time player identification, which sets it apart from any competitor.
Players simply download the Swish app, which connects them to their Digital Player Profile and brings every on-court session into one connected experience. Any number of players can shoot at one hoop at once, as the proprietary AI identifies each one and automatically syncs every shot to that profile. This makes Swish the first real-world online game for basketball, where players rank fairly on one global skill leaderboard, and an ordinary hoop becomes permanent, always-on infrastructure built for mass-market scale.
The model is already live. In a recent US deployment, Swish powered a multi-hoop tournament, with teams competing head-to-head in real time, each shooting on its own hoop while their results ranked on a single live leaderboard.
"We are building the connected layer basketball has never had," said Joel Bar-El, Co-founder and CEO of Swish Basket. "Technology has finally reached the point where every court, anywhere, can play as one. This funding lets us put Swish on courts across the world and give every player a way to measure, compete, and be seen. Because all of Swish's processing runs on the sensor rather than in the cloud, the platform is built to reach tens of thousands of courts at low cost."
Swish has deployed in five locations across Europe, Asia, and the United States, where hundreds of players have used the system and tens of thousands of shots have been tracked. NBA Hall of Famer Mitch Richmond has publicly demonstrated the platform onstage.
Swish Basket was founded in 2025 by Joel Bar-El, a serial computer-vision entrepreneur who previously built Trax, the first Singapore-born unicorn, valued at over 3 billion dollars.
"We backed Swish because it brings proven computer-vision expertise to a corner of sport that has never had a connected data layer," said Anat Tila Cherni, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Aristagora VC. "This team has built category-defining technology before, and the early traction across multiple markets shows the same pattern taking shape. We are proud to lead this round and back Swish as it scales."
