On April 22 — the eve of the Draft — Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University and the AI Strike Team brought together investors, founders, civic leaders, and sports executives for Powering the Future of Sport: A Draft Week Showcase at CMU's newly opened Robotics Innovation Center in Hazelwood Green. The venue itself tells a story: a former steel mill site reimagined as the nation's premier facility for physical AI research and commercialization. Old Pittsburgh and new Pittsburgh, in one building.
The centerpiece of the day was the Forge to Field AI Pitch Competition — a Shark Tank-style showdown drawing over 100 applications from across the country, with six finalists competing for a share of a $1.75 million prize pool LancasterOnline, including up to $1 million in AWS cloud credits. The prize comes with a condition: winners commit to establishing a meaningful operating presence in Pittsburgh or Western Pennsylvania.
Judging the competition was a panel that included Pittsburgh-area native Mark Cuban, Dick's Sporting Goods founder Ed Stack, and others — with a clear message that the city is serious about attracting talent and capital at the intersection of sport and tech. Axios
And if you needed any more proof that this was a full-city moment — Steelers legend Jerome Bettis was there, watching Mayor Corey O'Connor dive for a football thrown by a robot, scuffing his navy suit in the process. LancasterOnline As Bettis put it, AI is "gonna change the game" his son will know when he graduates from college. "That's what makes it so beautiful — it's happening at home."
Cuban didn't hold back either: "I think Pittsburgh, after Silicon Valley, is becoming the leading center for artificial intelligence and robotics. CMU is really establishing themselves, not only as a leader in terms of education, but in terms of entrepreneurship as well. And what makes us dramatically different than Silicon Valley is it's affordable to live here." LancasterOnline
The Six Companies That Pitched
Here are the six finalists chosen from nearly 100 qualified applicants across more than 10 tech hubs nationwide: Cyprus CEO
Flowstate — Think of them as the intelligence layer for sports video. Their AI agents analyze both live and pre-recorded footage to automate workflows across content, sponsorship, media operations, and fan distribution. If you've ever wondered how leagues and teams could move faster on content at scale, this is the answer.
MyoVerse — A wearable neuromuscular sensing and AI analytics platform that converts real-time muscle activity into objective biomarkers. The use cases span performance optimization, rehabilitation, and clinical decision-making. This is the kind of tech that bridges athletic performance and sports medicine in a way that's genuinely new.
As AI Strike Team founder Joanna Doven framed it: "The future of sport isn't just about winning games — it's about who owns the advantage in the next technological era. The same AI and robotics transforming athlete performance are the same technologies powering trillion-dollar industries like defense and healthcare." Carnegie Mellon University