Hello and happy Friday! I hope you enjoy this weekend’s NFL conference championship games. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- Cosm signs Monster Energy to venue sponsorship
- TGL comes to video games for the first time with PGA Tour Pro Golf
- GPS DataViz rebrands as Whistle Performance, raises $2M
Cosm signs Monster Energy to venue sponsorship
Cosm will debut a multiyear partnership with Monster Energy during its presentations of UFC 324 on Saturday, the immersive venue operator’s first multi-site sponsorship deal. Financial terms were not available. The agreement designates Monster as Cosm’s “official energy drink partner” and will include several unique elements:
- Cosm and Monster will co-produce branded visuals -- including, down the line, a commercial -- to feature on Cosm venues’ 87-foot-diameter LED domes. The first examples will be incorporated into Cosm’s UFC broadcasts this weekend.
- Monster beverages will be the only energy drinks sold in Cosm venues, and Cosm will add a new food item to its menu called the “Beast Burger” -- a double wagyu smash burger with a black bun, white cheddar cheese and bespoke, charred-lime-flavored ”Monster sauce," among other ingredients -- that was developed by Cosm’s in-house culinary team in collaboration with Monster.
- Other experiential activations like venue take-overs and gaming events.
Monster’s marketing rights will first launch at Cosm’s operational venues in L.A. and Dallas, which opened in 2024, before expanding the roll out to upcoming locations in Atlanta, Detroit and Cleveland over the next two years.
The UFC broadcast is a natural place to launch the relationship, as Monster is a major UFC sponsor, and Cosm will continue to be intentional in how the brand shows up in its venues, according to the company’s Head/Venues Corey Breton -- including considering factors like overlap with Cosm’s media or league partners’ existing sponsors.
“We want to be hyper-selective on [brands] we let in,” Breton told SBJ. “This is a digital world, and we’re trying to enhance the fan experience, so we’ve got to be very cautious. Because as soon as we do this across multiple venues and it becomes cluttered, I think it would damage what we’ve built from a Cosm perspective... We would never force a brand into misalignment with content or something that we’re putting on.”
Cosm was intentionally brand-agnostic in its venues for the first full year of its L.A. and Dallas locations, Breton added, but having proven the concept is now exploring similar deals across a range of categories.
“This [the Monster deal] will be the first of many,” Breton said. “We’ve been in active dialogue with every major category that you can imagine. Our value proposition is uniquely positioned. We’re not a typical, stick-and-ball, brick-and-mortar, four-walls [business]... A lot of educating has happened over the course of the past year. This is the tipping point for us.”
Cosm and Monster negotiated their deal directly. Breton and Head of Venue Sponsorships Chris Lamb led talks for Cosm, while Monster’s Global CMO Dan McHugh, SVP/Monster Brands & International Marketing Jordi Gayolà Guitart and Dir of Brand Marketing Brandon Hagy were instrumental on the Monster side.
In 2025, Cosm was named one of SBJ’s 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies and won Sports Breakthrough of the Year at the 18th annual Sports Business Awards.
TGL comes to video games for the first time with PGA Tour Pro Golf
In a deal befitting a tech-infused golf outfit, TGL is working with mobile gaming studio HypGames to appear in PGA Tour Pro Golf on Apple Arcade. This is the first time TGL has been in a video game, on mobile, consoles or PC.
The first four TGL holes coming to PGA Tour Pro Golf are:
PGA Tour Pro Golf is also adding Hammer-style tournaments, reflecting how TGL plays by forcing players to race the clock, as scores multiply the longer you take to play the hole. It also features a solo campaign mode, with challenges and rewards crafted around TGL teams and gear.
HypGames launched PGA Tour Pro Golf in 2025. It features courses such as Pebble Beach, Bay Hill and TPC Sawgrass.
GPS DataViz rebrands as Whistle Performance, raises $2M seed round
GPS DataViz, a provider of sports performance intelligence software, has rebranded as Whistle Performance and announced a $2M seed round from angel investors.
Whistle Performance works with more than 150 teams across college and the pros, including the NFL’s Steelers, the NWSL’s Pride, Univ. of South Carolina women’s basketball, Texas Tech and Vanderbilt football and League One Volleyball (LOVB).
Founded by Marc Kerrest, a derivatives trader-turned-college soccer coach, the startup’s founding mission was to visualize GPS data sets, as the original name suggested. But the growing firm now ingests more than 80 types of data and applies AI to automate insights, such as flagging asymmetries and predicting training loads in particular practice sessions. The new name harkens to the use of whistles in sports to signal when to start or when stop.
“We started very much just integrating GPS data,” Kerrest said. “Ultimately, we outgrew it, and it just caused some confusion. What we’ve grown into is doing a lot more than that.”
Among the individuals to invest are Hockey HOFer Joe Thornton and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, the brother of the startup’s founder. Marc Kerrest said the decision not to accept venture funding was intentional given the firm’s organic rate of growth.
“That changes the expectations,” Kerrest said of venture investment. “The valuation might be higher, but then you’ve got to hit certain targets.”
Kerrest played soccer at Tufts and was coaching the sport at Colorado College when he realized the need for new software. The team’s strength and conditioning coach, Kevin Cronin, had left the post, and Kerrest inherited the job of building daily reports. Drawing on his mastery of Excel from his days in finance, Kerrest automated several tasks that had been tediously manual. A newer feature, Whistle AI, makes the process even more efficient by allowing natural language search through the data.
Cronin, who later worked with special forces in the military, began collaborating on infusing the sport science knowhow and is now Whistle’s VP/Performance Science. In all, the startup has 14 employees with a strong tech focus to build for users from high school through the pros, support the coaching practitioners at their level of need.
“To develop and maintain those systems takes a lot of time,” Kerrest said. “We’ve got a team of eight engineers who’ve worked at some of the biggest software companies in the world. That’s all they’re working on. And so we can just do that at a high level and then drive the derivatives off of that.”
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