The Pitch #4 - Reborn SportsTech's team on leveraging AI to guide African athletes' development

African sport has never lacked talent. What has often been missing is the infrastructure around that talent, the systems that protect athletes, guide their development, and turn their potential into sustainable careers. For too many players, injuries, workload mismanagement, or guesswork in training decisions have disrupted promising pathways before they truly begin.

That gap sits at the centre of REBORN’s mission. Recently crowned winners of the NBA Africa Triple-Double Accelerator, the Moroccan-based performance-technology startup is focused on bringing structure, data, and long-term thinking into athlete development across the continent.

REBORN is building a unified performance ecosystem designed to help athletes, clubs, academies, and federations better understand what is happening beneath the surface of performance. By integrating data into everyday decision-making, the platform aims to shift organisations away from instinct-driven choices and toward more informed, sustainable approaches to athlete management.

A scalable performance-tech ecosystem

According to the REBORN team, co-founders Fayçal Louryagli Amine and Youssef Maaroufi, the platform delivers “holistic performance indicators covering athletic load, on-field performance trends, and contextual medical and mental inputs.” These insights are designed to help stakeholders “move from intuition-based decisions to data-informed performance management,” providing a clearer picture of athlete readiness and risk.

At the core of that approach is a deliberate use of data and artificial intelligence. REBORN combines proprietary athletic performance algorithms with AI-powered insights, but the emphasis is not on complexity. Instead, the team focuses on “turning raw data into simple, actionable recommendations, rather than overwhelming users with complexity.” The goal is clarity; information that can be acted on quickly by coaches, performance staff, and decision-makers.

This philosophy is especially intentional within African sporting environments, where access to performance resources and specialist staff can vary significantly. REBORN is designed for clubs, academies, and federations, with a strong emphasis on youth development and talent pathways. “Our goal is to support athletes from early stages to elite levels using the same performance logic and standards,” the team explains, helping organisations build continuity and consistency across development pipelines.

Positioning Reborn for growth

While the platform is still in its growth phase, early deployments are already demonstrating tangible impact. Organisations using REBORN have reported improvements in training load management, increased awareness around injury risk, and stronger communication between performance staff and coaches. Perhaps most significantly, the team notes that “the biggest impact has been creating shared performance visibility across departments,” aligning stakeholders around the same performance data and objectives.

Partnerships play a central role in that progress. REBORN, already backed by Morocco’s UM6P’s sports subsidiary Evosport, works closely with clubs, institutions, and technology partners to co-build, validate, and continuously refine its platform. For the startup, performance innovation is a collective effort, one shaped by real-world use cases and ongoing collaboration with the organisations it serves.

The importance of this work is amplified within the African sports landscape. “Africa has exceptional athletic talent, but often lacks structured performance monitoring tools,” the REBORN team says. “Performance technology helps protect talent, accelerate development, and increase international competitiveness.” In that context, data becomes not just a performance tool, but a long-term investment in athlete longevity and value.

Winning the NBA Africa Triple-Double Accelerator marked a pivotal moment in REBORN’s journey. The recognition validated both the company’s technology and its long-term vision, reinforcing the belief that African-founded sport-tech startups can build solutions with global relevance when supported by the right ecosystem. The win came with $25,000 in cash, access to Carnegie Mellon University’s Africa’s Business Incubation Program, $10,000 in API credits, and an exclusive immersion day with OpenAI’s engineering team, providing REBORN with capital, technical resources, and strategic guidance to accelerate its next phase of growth.

As the company continues its growth, REBORN is now focused on refining its product, expanding partnerships, and scaling its performance ecosystem across more markets. With data at the centre of its model, the startup is positioning itself at the intersection of athlete development and sports business, working toward a future where African talent is supported by performance insights that are accessible, practical, and built for the realities of the continent.