We frequently cover fan experience here at SBJ, and our first entry is a unique example of it. SuperQuickQuestion offers short one-on-one moments between fans and athletes.
So let’s jump into a profile of the startup’s founder, Dave Benson. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- Dave Benson’s SuperQuickQuestion came from an efficiency exercise
- PIF-backed Humain acquires controlling stake in ai.io to create sports vertical
- The unique segmentation of college athletics and the ticketing data that fosters it
Dave Benson’s SuperQuickQuestion came from an efficiency exercise
Dave Benson didn’t like “super quick questions.”
It was a phrase he ran into often during his three-year stint at IBM. Benson came out of 20-plus years in the news business (working for the BBC, CBS Radio and Bleacher Report). His experience existed on hard deadlines and short timetables. The questions were often lead-ins to elaborate conversations, and they were anything but super quick.
“That was the original idea,” Benson said. “It was business efficiency because I talk fast, and I’m somewhat impatient. That was the thing.” He’d start a timer on his watch and get straight to the heart of the interaction.
Call it the kindling for his startup idea, or a way to own those frustrating corporate interactions more, but Benson is now four years into a startup venture called SuperQuickQuestion, a fan engagement platform that turns an hour of an athlete’s time into deeply connective moments that yield significant first-party data opportunities.
Three questions with Dave Benson
What is something you have to do at the start of your day? “I do the Times puzzles that everybody does, Wordle and the Spelling Bee. I compete with my dad, and then I try to have a smoothie.”
How would past Dave have reacted to the fact you’re a startup founder now? “Shocked, for sure. But when I tell people about the core concept — that it’s around brevity and getting a bunch of words in one minute — people laugh, and they go, ‘Well, that’s exactly right.’ That’s always been me.”
What’s the sporting event you’re most excited about over the next few years? “Well, I’m excited that the Mets look like they’re not going to suck. I usually try and go to 10 or so games a year with my sons. I’m very excited for their next Little League season, the last one that I’m going to coach before they get too old for me. And then the World Cup’s going to be awesome.”
SQQ has activated with major brands like Verizon — its biggest customer, with the long-term NFL league sponsor deploying with 20 teams in January and February — and Pepsi. The company also has team-level relationships with Pacers Sports & Entertainment, the Colts and Italian giant Juventus.
The sponsorship angle has been a recent emergence, ramping up SQQ’s potential in sports. “You can take a sport that’s global and make it feel more local,” said Encore Sports & Entertainment CEO Nick Kelly. “That’s really where the value is.”
How the platform works
Benson, who is based in New York City, created SQQ with a pair of key assumptions: One, that a minute was more than enough time for a fan to ask a question, get an answer and then speak with an athlete; and two, that the lack of anonymity would keep virtual attendees from doing something negative.
Turns out, he was right about both. “We’ve done over 5,000 of these, and nobody’s misbehaved so far,” said Benson, as he superstitiously knocked his knuckles on his desk.
SQQ, a two-person crew with Benson and CTO Brian Weissler, acts as a one-on-one private interaction space between the subject of the call and the fans who’ve been selected as participants. Prompts for the event generate quick first-party data entries for fans (name, email and their question, if picked) and are whittled down to 40 or 50 by a mix of AI and screening from SQQ and the athlete and/or their representatives.
The Colts were one of the first team clients for SQQ, a connection made through the startup’s 2024 Techstars Sports Accelerator experience in Indianapolis. The team rolled out a pilot at the end of that year with injured rookie cornerback Julius Brents as a perk for season-ticket holders. Charlie Shin, the Colts’ vice president of analytics and digital innovation, said the engagement was easy to gauge by the reaction of those Colts faithful to getting the time.
“Just the excitement that we’ve seen from all these fans of having that one-to-one opportunity and conversation was just great,” Shin said. “And they were bringing their kids into the conversations and meeting them and taking photos at the end.”
The business-changing shift
While teams were the initial focus for SQQ, a dramatic shift in the business came from advice through the company’s Verizon connection. The relationship formed thanks to a chance meeting of Benson and Katie Ward, Verizon’s associate director/regional partner activation, who sat with each other randomly at a conference. That led to collaboration with Kelly, then the VP of partnerships at Verizon. As Benson ran through a pitch deck with Kelly ahead of SQQ’s fundraising efforts, Kelly stopped him. SQQ could solve one of Kelly’s biggest problems: getting use of all the player appearances in sponsorship deals.
“We always struggled — and this is where it kind of clicked for him — to do these physical appearances, especially with bigger names,” said Kelly, who is now an adviser for SQQ. “Because their schedule sucks. And then the overall cost starts to compound: I’ve got to get security, I’ve got to get a brand activation team, I’ve got to get an athlete there.”
That goes out the window with SQQ, which can pull those appearances out of fixed, physical locations and allows athletes to do them from anywhere. A recent Verizon activation with former Manchester City striker Sergio Agüero took place during the soccer great’s vacation in the Caribbean. SQQ gets paid per activation, with the long-term business model goal of developing retainer relationships with teams and/or brands as a fan engagement tool of choice.
SQQ has been deployed across the entertainment industry and also used as a way for children on the spectrum or with mental wellness struggles to talk to Santa Claus. It’s part of an impact, and a life, that Benson could’ve never imagined when he put his former co-workers on timers.
“My last job was supposed to be my last job,” Benson said. “But then I came up with the idea and then suddenly had some people who believed in me writing checks to me to build it, and then we built it and then I quit my job.”
PIF-backed Humain acquires controlling stake in ai.io to create sports vertical
Humain, the AI-centric firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has acquired a controlling stake in ai.io, the scouting and development app with an early focus on soccer, to launch a new sports vertical. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
With smartphone-based motion capture as its core technology, ai.io has an aiScout product to find new talent -- with partners including MLS and Premier League clubs Chelsea and Burnley -- as well as aiLab for performance analysis. It also has done work in tennis at the Next Gen ATP Finals and in baseball and American football.
Ai.io deliberately grew slowly to date, but when starting to raise an investment round last year, its leadership connected with Humain and decided it was the type of financial backing and sports industry connections that it was looking for. The PIF owns Liv Golf and has invested in tennis via the ATP and WTA tours, in MMA via the PFL and soccer via the Saudi Pro League and Newcastle United.
“If you scale too quickly, you get out of your depth too quickly,” said Richard Felton-Thomas, ai.io COO and Director of Sport Science. “You don’t have the team to actually support it once it’s all live. So I think we were quite sensible with really doubling down on the MLS and Chelseas and Burnleys. We put off a bit of that scale.
“There’s no excuses now. So expanding the team that’s there to deliver aiScout and aiLab across [global] football is priority one.”
Growth into other sports is next, as well as adjacent industries such as healthcare and physical therapy. The motion capture tech, 3DAT, was initially developed by Intel and was trained on athletes across all sports; it has even analyzed astronauts in space. ai.io has also helped identify talent in rural areas of India and Senegal.
“Sport is one of humanity’s strongest forces for connection, and at Humain we exist to bridge the gap between human potential and artificial intelligence,” Humain CEO Tareq Amin said while announcing the deal.
Based in London, ai.io has opened US office space in Indiana as part of the Sports Tech HQ collective. Felton-Thomas noted that ai.io will remain its own business unit with its own P&L and the same leadership, but input from the PIF and Humain Sport is fully encouraged.
“We want them to be involved as much as possible because they have lots of rights and lots of sponsorships, and that’s a sales pipeline for us. Them leaning in is really important to us,” he said, adding: “What does change, of course, is the speed we get to run at now.”
The unique segmentation of college athletics and the ticketing data that fosters it
Brendan Lynch spent the second half of 2025 reframing his definition of fan. Hired as the president of Paciolan in July, his eight-plus years at Ticketmaster (six of which as global EVP of enterprise and revenue) had been colored by a heavily pro-sports perspective.
“One of the things I started picking up on was when I talk about fans in sports, everybody at Pac and our clients started asking, ‘OK, so when you’re saying fans, are you talking about alumni or donors or the student tickets?’” Lynch chuckled. “I was like, ‘Well, they’re fans, right?’”
I’m required by the universe to highlight college athletics as a tumultuous ecosystem and also use phrases like “uncharted waters” when acknowledging the volatility for a department dealing with NIL, the transfer portal, revenue sharing and more. But one thing that Lynch has found true in these seven-ish months of learning: The commitment of the college fan remains. And because of that, capturing and responding to those new ticket buyers entering the system (and fostering the relationship from there on) is more crucial than ever.
Paciolan works with 170 schools, supporting them with data tools, such as its Paciolan IQ analysis platform, and other automations of the marketing and outreach. Part of the larger Learfield conglomerate with 325 employees and growing, the California-based Paciolan receives a fee per ticket sold, incentivizing the need to push forward ticket sales for clients nationwide. Lynch highlighted the value of new names pretty clearly: On average, Paciolan sees that a new person in the system will put $50 toward tickets and another $20 on donations, Lynch shared.
And that person will continue to grow in spending as the years pass. Consider, now, that Paciolan client schools create a combined 5 million-plus new fans every year. That’s significant cash injection. Your standard alum will continue to come back and not be affected by the coach or star player of their favorite program moving to a different school. A random donation can come in from a complete stranger to the CRM because they happened to be inspired that day. The parent of a current or former student can develop a love of the school and stick around (my father and Appalachian State, as a clear example).
This is still early days stuff. “The capabilities to have this level of detail on customer lifetime value, we only go back half, three quarters of a decade,” Lynch said. “This wasn’t a thing with paper tickets.”
The schools figuring out unique data opportunities
So who’s doing it well? Well, just like with the fans, that’s a very segmented answer. Michigan’s email marketing outreach, broadly referred to as Michigan Insider, is a well-oiled effort, especially for those new names in the system.
Keith Bretzius, director/digital marketing for Michigan Athletics, said it’s been a long-running commitment to build out the various outreach pathways for its massive fan base. Two years ago, as the sports industry prepared for Google’s phase-out of third-party cookies (which ultimately didn’t happen), Michigan focused on bringing more of its own data in-house. That, Bretzius said, has led to a 47% increase in the Michigan fan database in the last couple of years.
“The more they know about us, the longer we’re in their inbox, the bigger presence that we have with them,” Bretzius said. “The long-term strategy is that it’s going to pay off for us — where we might convert that individual ticket purchaser to a season ticket or just maintain a really long relationship with that fan.”
Others, like Texas A&M, have found success in bundling donation opportunities with ticket purchases. Virginia Tech, meanwhile, is one of a few schools that has used non-sports events as massive data injections. Its Metallica concert from the summer of 2025, Lynch highlighted, generated roughly 12,000 new names on file.
Perhaps one of the most unique use cases is happening at Louisiana Tech, which has taken Paciolan’s reward system for donations and turned it into a loyalty play for students. While students are the lowest spenders among fans by far, they also have the longest lifetime to grow into some of those other profiles.
Wally Crittenden, senior associate AD/ championship resources and the athletic department’s CRO, said instead of donations, Louisiana Tech has begun tracking the total number of scans for students who opt into the free Blue Bloods experience (it’s also the largest student organization on campus, by the way). Scans become the gateway for more exclusive opportunities, such as away game trips, bowl game tickets and other add-ons.
The loyalty feature rolled out last summer, and since August, 3,840 unique students (the school’s total student population is just over 12,000) have been identified by the department across more than 10,000 student scans into athletics events. There is a future coming at Louisiana Tech where profiles of students (considering their majors, other student activities, etc.) can be projected forward to the type of alum/fan they will be.
“All across the country, athletic departments are trying to articulate the value of athletics and to the overall student experience,” Crittenden said. “But certainly for us, in order to even have that conversation with our academic counterparts, and really just constituents of different focus, we got to have data to show what we’re doing and how it’s being leveraged and why it’s important to student life.”
Ethan Joyce can be reached at ejoyce@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
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