At 5 a.m. across college football fields nationwide, receivers are catching balls with uncanny athleticism. Instead of starting QBs initiating the action, however, it’s the Seeker, the world’s first robotic quarterback that passes, punts and kicks. Using software, sensors and motors to track movement, it can hit every route imaginable. By increasing efficiency, reducing risk of injury and enhancing practice time, this innovation is reshaping sports technology. This week, Kristen Meinzer talks with Igor Karlicic and Bhargav Maganti, the founders of Monarc Sports, to discuss their path to developing the Seeker and what the future holds. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
At 5 a.m. across college football fields nationwide, receivers are catching balls with uncanny athleticism. Instead of starting QBs initiating the action, however, it’s the Seeker, the world’s first robotic quarterback that passes, punts and kicks. Using software, sensors and motors to track movement, it can hit every route imaginable. By increasing efficiency, reducing risk of injury and enhancing practice time, this innovation is reshaping sports technology. This week, Kristen Meinzer talks with Igor Karlicic and Bhargav Maganti, the founders of Monarc Sports, to discuss their path to developing the Seeker and what the future holds. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
[00:00:00]
KRISTEN: Whether it’s singing a duet, walking hand in hand, or playing football, some things are hard to do alone.
Bhargav Maganti: It's exhilarating for a person who’s not a football player I think. But for our athletes, I think that what they would say is that it feels game-like. It feels comparable to a quarterback that they would have throw to them.
KRISTEN: Bhargav Maganti, who you just heard, is one of the founders of Monarc along with Igor Karlicic. Together, these two engineers are revolutionizing football.
Through their company, Monarc, they’ve created the Seeker, the world’s first robotic quarterback that passes, punts, and kicks. Thanks to the Seeker, players that historically would need a practice partner are able to practice alone. They can get game-like reps on their own time.
The technology is already impressing some of the biggest football programs in the country. And Monarc has quickly become part of the vanguard, leading the way to a tech-filled football future.
[00:01:00]
Igor Karlicic There's so much cool stuff happening right now in, in the entire industry. The teams that are going to be on top of that are the teams that are going to be winning in the years to come.
BEAT
KRISTEN: I’m Kristen Meinzer, and this is Innovation Uncovered, from Invesco QQQ…
Last season, we shone a light on groundbreaking innovation happening across a number of industries.
And this season, we’ll go deep on more boundary-pushing innovations, with an even greater emphasis on the incredible people behind them.
To kick off the season, I sat down with Bhargav Maganti and Igor Karlicic, co-founders of Monarc, the company behind the world’s first robotic quarterback.
MUSIC OUT
Kristen Meinzer: Thank you so much for joining us today on Innovation Uncovered.
Igor Karlicic: Thanks for having us.
Bhargav Maganti: Hi, Kristen.
Kristen Meinzer: I am so pumped to be talking with you both. Now, I am curious. Are the two of you self-professed jocks? Do either of you play football?
[00:02:00]
Igor Karlicic: Both Bhargav and I played different sports in high school. Barghav played tennis. I swam and played water polo. So there’s definitely an appreciation for athletes and what they go through, but to say that we had an experience that is comparable would be false.
Kristen Meinzer: Are you football fans though? Are you people who have your giant foam finger and wave it around every football season?
Bhargav Maganti: We are now to some extent. We've had the opportunity to work with a number of athletes from really all levels. And now, yeah. Yeah. We're definitely fans.
Kristen Meinzer: How did you two meet each other?
Bhargav Maganti: Yeah. So Igor and I met in 2008. We were freshmen at Northwestern University and we became friends pretty early on. We both studied mechanical engineering and both of us spent a lot of time working in our engineering shop.
Igor Karlicic: The reason we were such good friends was that we had a common interest and that was design and creating things. And we had multiple professors, multiple classes that really pushed us to try and think outside the box and treated us as entrepreneurs in a sense.
[00:03:00]
Kristen Meinzer: How did two engineering guys running in the same circles who were at the time not football people decide to start a company that is about football?
Bhargav Maganti: So at some point along our journey of learning and developing, we actually made a pact where we decided that one day we should create a company -- we should build something very cool.
Bhargav Maganti: So a new piece of tech started emerging and really it was for indoor positioning. And when we realized that we'd have access to a technology that enables us to track at upwards of 30 times per second, we got mesmerized by it.
Previously what was being used in most sports for tracking people was GPS, but when you have athletes that are running 10 yards a second that's not something that's going to be fast enough to actually comprehend what's going on.
So that idea really was what initially got Igor and I extremely interested in pursuing Monarch full-time and quitting our jobs.
[00:04:00]
Kristen Meinzer: Now for those of us who have never seen the Seeker, who are trying to imagine what a robotic quarterback looks like, can you explain what it looks like and what it's actually made out of?
Igor Karlicic: Uh yeah. If you can imagine about, five’ six’’ tall robot with a magazine that holds six balls. It weighs about 300 plus pounds, and it's made out of a lot of steel and aluminum.
There's a screen that's connected from the lower part of the body that you essentially interact with. So, it's pivoting, it's tilting back, it's moving around, however you need it. and then you have two large rotors again on top of that can throw, basically the full field.
Bhargav Maganti: Right. One of our main points that we try to articulate to our customers and our users is that we provide game-like reps. And the way that we're able to do that is we have a tag pager-size device that players are able to put on their hips. And with that, we're actually able to track where they are on the field. Right now, it's just distance. So distance away from the front of the Seeker. But with that, you can imagine there are a number of different modes that our robot can engage with that athlete.
[00:05:00]
Kristen Meinzer: Talk more about why reps are so important.
Igor Karlicic: Well, it's the one thing that they're supposed to do really well, and it becomes very difficult to do that really well when you aren't catching any passes during practice. To put this into perspective, we did some time studies when we were developing at the University of Iowa. We saw that a third string receiver caught as few as 20 passes in the entire week of practice. Live reps. And so you think about what this means for the individual, their scholarship, their opportunities to advance, not only within their own roster, but in their careers and it's crippling.
Bhargav Maganti: So ultimately even for those athletes that want to improve and realize that the best way to hone your craft is to continue to do it as much as you possibly can. They're not able to actually do it. And that's really where we came in.
Kristen Meinzer: How many times is the seeker going to be throwing a ball in a typical training session?
Bhargav Maganti: It really depends, but we've seen- we have one athlete in particular, he's a high school athlete and he actually gets a thousand catches in every single morning.
[00:06:00]
Kristen Meinzer: Oh my gosh. Yeah. See no training assistant's going to be able to,[laughter] they're going to throw out their shoulder and then they're going to collapse on the ground afterward.
Igor Karlicic: So the problem really goes both ways, right? So just as you mentioned, there's so many more receiving positions and so many more people that need to practice catching the ball than there are throwing positions. But at the same time, the quarterbacks, they have to have a limited amount of throws that they're actually throwing. Otherwise it limits their longevity. So their careers actually start with where they are late high school and early college and the volume that they're throwing. You see at the NFL level, so many quarterbacks that right now are having either shoulder or elbow, uh, issues. And they're all unlimited limited throws. So between a hundred and 150 throws for per practice and that's for them. Um, so it's, you know, it's a problem that really goes to both sides.
MUSIC UP
TRANSITION
[00:07:00]
KRISTEN: So the Seeker looks less like a humanoid robot from a sci-fi movie, and more like a polished cousin of the Curiosity Rover on Mars. The hulking 300 plus pound robot has an antenna that tracks a sensor athletes wear on their hip.
When you flip the Seeker on, you hear the motors spinning.
[Tape of Seeker from Monarc]
A receiver steps out in front, and then you hear consistent thumps and clicks. Those are the sounds of several balls being passed to a receiver.
Like the guys said, one of the revelations of The Seeker is that it gives receivers and kick returners more reps… while – at the same time – preventing wear and tear on quarterbacks’ and kickers’ bodies.
Science on the long term effects of playing football has made safety and protection a top priority. The Seeker does its part in reducing unnecessary overuse and injury… by making the controllable environment of practice efficient and more productive.
But it has taken time for Bhargav and Igor to perfect the Seeker’s sophisticated technology. [00:08:00] They performed countless tests on the Seeker and built nine physical iterations before it went to market. The Seeker wasn’t always the elite machine it is today.
MUSIC OUT
Kristen Meinzer: Can you tell us about some of maybe the earlier iterations of the Seeker when it wasn't quite as developed and quite as sophisticated?
Bhargav Maganti: Those early days were definitely very interesting for us. We were essentially learning everything from scratch. So Igor and I are both engineers, but we had never- no one on the team had previously designed a robotic quarterback. So it was starting from the ground up.
We actually had nine physical iterations prior to our actual launch product, and then innumerable software iterations, as you can imagine. A lot of complete resets we had gone down a couple of years using a certain tech or a certain methodology and realized that, you know what? There's a better way to do this.
So let's tear this all apart and start again.
Kristen Meinzer: Now in the beginning, how did you test this technology? Was it just the two of you and your robot seeker out there playing in a park, is that what you were doing?
[00:09:00]
Bhargav Maganti: Yeah, so we actually did a lot of testing in our home and our office, a small townhouse in Iowa city where we were doing our development and we actually brought our Seeker to our balcony every once in a while. And then we threw balls off the balcony to test where it was going to land. How is the spiral looking? Mechanically, are we sound?
Kristen Meinzer: And are there any moments you had though where things just weren't going right where you thought, oh my gosh, this is not going according to plan?
Igor Karlicic: So one of the things that we did is- so we would work during the day in our townhouse, our entire team. and then at night we would go and use the facility, oftentimes the, the practices and- the athletes train really late.
So we would come in the after hours, usually around 8:00 PM, and test as long as we needed to in the solitude where nobody could see us. So we gave ourselves the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes we'd be there in the morning when the graduate assistants would come in and start setting up the cones for practice at 5:00 AM.
[00:10:00]
We're not ashamed of our early development days because it was in that lowkey, relaxed environment that we were able to just get a lot of work done.
Kristen Meinzer: So a lot of the changes in the product were because of the misery that you went through, but how many of the changes were because of feedback from actual users from actual athletes and teams?
Bhargav Maganti: So I'd say that, you know, in the initial stages, a lot of the ergonomics and general functionality that was, you know, that was something that was influenced by our interactions with the Seeker, but really when it comes to, um, the, the modes, all of that comes from athletes, uh, telling us, you know, what the types of things that they would like to do.
Kristen Meinzer: Can you give me some examples of what some of those modes are and some of those features, and so on that came directly from the players?
Igor Karlicic: Uh, yeah, so, I guess more, more recently we created an automated end over end kick, functionality. And that was, at the behest of a lot of special teams coaches asking for, “Hey, you know, like to be able to vary in a certain way, hits certain yardages.” And that's something that we just released last week.
[00:11:00]
Kristen: Very cool, but.. I’m curious, a real human quarterback, a non robotic quarterback, that is, is not a hundred percent precise. A human is going to not always hit you at exactly the same spot on the field as they did yesterday, or, even five minutes ago.
So is something lost when the randomness of the human experience is taken out of the practice and replaced with a Seeker?
Igor Karlicic: We keep that randomness. So the ability to place a ball exactly where we want and when we want it means that we can also mess it up however we want, when we want. So, one thing that's actually counterintuitive is a lot of quarterbacks, especially at the higher levels, struggle throwing poor balls during practice. In a game-like situation, a ball might get tipped. A quarterback is under pressure. So they're going to under throw it, over throw it. In practice, they literally cannot throw a bad throw. They're just, they're trained to be doing the right thing at the right times, right?
You're not going to be training to throw a bad throw. We actually have been able to really help out in that regard [00:12:00] because we can again, mess it up if you want it messed up or we can dial in exactly how you want it. So you have the ability to choose.
Kristen Meinzer: Yeah, I- I didn't even think about that. The difference between how people play in a practice versus playing a game because when you're playing in a game, there's so much interference. Obviously there's this thing called the opposition.
MUSIC UP
TRANSITION
KRISTEN: Bhargav and Igor’s early development days paid off and their freshman year pact to “build something very cool” has come to fruition. The Seeker is already being used by some big-time football institutions to help players improve their game...
...11 college teams, 13 pro players, and a training facility.
To get the word out in a sporting world where tradition tends to reign supreme, they quickly realized that pounding the pavement would be their ticket to success..this meant getting in a van and driving cross country … but, with a robotic quarterback riding shotgun.
[00:13:00]
MUSIC OUT
Kristen Meinzer: So tell me, at what point did you start to think, we’re really onto something here?
Bhargav Maganti: Yeah, I think that actually takes the story back to when we started doing a lot of road shows. We put our Seeker into a van and we drove it across the country, trying to visit a number of college teams and NFL teams, and really anyone that would, that would see us.
And I remember one instance, we walked on to a field to do a demo. The head coach came out in the middle of his lunch. He saw what the Seeker was doing. He walked away a few minutes later. Didn't really say too much, but a few hours later we got a call that they were interested, so…
Igor Karlicic: I will add to this though that our first paying customer, the very first team that ordered a unit that was a production version actually connected with us on Twitter. They'd never even seen it.
Sometimes you have those occasions where it is just, somebody calls and they're like, great. I want it. And sometimes you really have to work for it. So, we've been on both sides of that, but fortunately the credibility from the teams that are using it right now makes it a little bit easier.
[00:14:00]
Bhargav Maganti:Yeah. We actually have roughly 10 teams right now. some of the customers that are using a seeker right now are Oklahoma, Iowa, LSU, Virginia.
Kristen Meinzer: Wow. So some big teams like household named teams are using the Seeker at this point.
Igor Karlicic: We had the luck of interacting with LSU, during their championship season, a few years ago in 2019.
We definitely got a lot of publicity out of having one of our two prototypes at the time, over at the university and that season panned out super well.
Kristen Meinzer: That doesn't just sound like luck to me. They actually improved their game because of you.
Igor Karlicic: What we see is winning organizations take an active interest in investing in their teams. And we have a very strong correlation right now with winning organizations. We can't take credit for that, but it really does come down to a staff mentality of investing in the right technologies.
And there's so much cool stuff happening right now in the entire industry. The teams that are going to be on top of that are the teams that are going to be winning in the years to come.
[00:15:00]
Kristen Meinzer: Very modest. Listen to that founder. Sounding all modest about his product. I'm curious about if the pandemic has influenced the rollout of the seeker or the people who are wanting to use the seeker at this point.
Bhargav Maganti: Yeah, it definitely has actually. We started acting as the quarantine quarterback. We started connecting with individuals and we provided them an arm when they didn't have one, because they weren't able to go back to their camps or didn't have anyone around to throw them the ball. We built out several seekers for players and several of them came on board as investors as well.
Kristen Meinzer: Oh, wow. That's a ringing endorsement right there, coming on board. How do you see the Seeker and Monarc more broadly evolving and scaling over time? What are you excited about for the future?
Bhargav Maganti: Yeah, I think really coming back full circle, we were initially really encouraged by the idea [00:16:00] of being able to take that data from the new technology that we had identified as compatible with our system and, um, provide insights that were never able to be provided before. So I think it's really going back to our roots. At this point, we've created a product that teams are able to really put into use in practice. Athletes are able to put into use, out of practice. So, coming up with, whether it's some form of augmented coaching or insights into exactly how a particular route was run or going deeper into the metrics or analytics, I think that's the direction that we as a company would like to go into.
Kristen Meinzer: Mm. Are there other innovations that you see in the world and you think, “oh, that could also change sports” or “that could change how we train people”?
Bhargav Maganti: I think that right now we're seeing data is exploding in sports and with such a huge influx of data, I think now it's up to innovative companies to determine how you can use that data and actually provide something that's actionable and useful. One of the, the tricky things, um, kind of at the beginning of localization data was that it wasn't as insightful.
[00:17:00]
It was very cool, but it didn't really tell you very much. And I think that having, uh, a lot of sports scientists on board, these companies has changed that and now teams are using localization for, uh, injury prevention for, uh, health metrics for all sorts of different things. But, I think that with this huge amount of data that we're starting to see, uh, we're going to see a lot of new, cool things come together from that.
Kristen Meinzer: Mm. And then do you think that sports practice will fundamentally down the road in the future? Look different?
Igor Karlicic: Absolutely. These are modifications that will have to be made for teams to remain competitive. It's going to be a tumultuous period for all the new tech that's coming out. But, uh, ultimately what we're seeing, especially in football is fewer injuries, and higher performance with each passing year.
Bhargav Maganti: I think that you'll just see that practice is a lot more smart and there's a lot more, uh, connectedness and there's a lot more tech that's involved in all sorts of different ways.
Igor Karlicic: We're really excited to see what's going to happen.
[00:18:00]
Kristen Meinzer: Do you ever think of expanding the Seekers’ technology to other sports? Do you feel like that technology could even apply to other sports?
Igor Karlicic: So it's definitely something that there is a lot of energy around. You know, even being here where we're located in Dallas, we've had, you know, baseball teams reach out to us.
For us, there has to be whatever we go into, whichever direction, there really has to be that energy, that same energy that we have around football, where the product that we have right now is really transformative. And that's something that energizes us. You know, when Bhargav and I made our pact a few years ago, we really wanted to do something that was cool. And we wanted to have a company that we would wake up every morning and just go at it because we loved it.
And I- we found that energy in football, we found that energy with this product. So we'll have to see where that energy takes us.
MUSIC UP
Kristen Meinzer: Bhargav, Igor. Thank you so much for joining us today on Innovation. Uncovered.
Igor Karlicic: Thanks for having us.
Bhargav Maganti: Thanks for having us, Kristen.
OUTRO
KRISTEN: Thanks for listening to Innovation Uncovered, from Invesco QQQ.
[00:19:00]
On the next episode, we’ll hear from Achin Bhowmik, the CTO of Starkey, a company that’s developing the next-generation of hearing aid technology...
Achin: As an engineer, I'm always passionate about exploring and probing the border between possibility and impossibility and pushing that a little further. Always definitely excited about that, but it's the emotional aspect of it. What impact does it have on the millions of people that use our products?
Kristen: Subscribe to Innovation Uncovered now, so you don’t miss an episode.
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Thanks for listening.
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