ReVal Pitch

ReVal is an AI-powered NIL scoring platform and marketplace. With ReVal athlete's have a better understanding of their worth and businesses can feel confident investing their money in players.

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Inspiration

NIL — name, image, and likeness — has grown into a $2.75 billion market since college athletes were first allowed to monetize their personal brands in 2021. But despite that explosive growth, the infrastructure underneath the market is still immature. Athletes don't know what they're worth. Businesses don't know which athletes will actually drive results. And too many deals are still made based on follower count, school prestige, or hype rather than real data. We saw this firsthand through conversations with athletes and local businesses in the Charlotte area, and we knew the problem would only get worse as regulation increased. On June 6, 2025, the House settlement was approved, ushering in direct athlete compensation and formal third-party NIL oversight. That shift made defensible pricing and measurable outcomes more important than ever. ReVal was born from a simple question: what if both sides of a NIL deal had better data to work with?

What It Does

ReVal is the analytics layer for college athlete NIL deals. We help athletes understand their commercial value and help businesses make smarter, more defensible partnership decisions. Our platform separates athlete value into two distinct scores:

Commercial Viability Score — measures what matters to brands: audience quality, brand safety, exposure, and athletic platform Roster Value Score — measures what matters to teams and collectives: on-field performance, positional scarcity, and intangibles

This separation is our core insight. A local restaurant and an athletic collective are not buying the same thing, so they shouldn't rely on the same number. Athletes join for free and can check their score in 30 seconds. Businesses pay for premium discovery, campaign tools, and deal analytics. How We Built It ReVal's current product foundation includes:

A scoring engine covering six sports: football, basketball, volleyball, soccer, softball, and baseball A live landing page with a score calculator where athletes can check their score for free A mobile app with leaderboard, athlete comparison, and profile features A data pipeline pulling real stats from college sports databases Newsletter and internal admin tools for managing the platform

Our tech stack is built on an Nx monorepo architecture with a FastAPI Python backend for the scoring engine, a Next.js web dashboard, and a React Native mobile app via Expo. We were selected as 1 of 10 funded projects in UNC Charlotte's 49er Foundry 2025–2026 startup accelerator, which gave us early validation, mentorship, and resources to develop the product. Challenges We Faced

Defining "value" across different buyers — The hardest design problem was recognizing that commercial value and roster value are fundamentally different. Early versions of our scoring model collapsed everything into one number, which didn't reflect how the market actually works. Data sourcing — Getting consistent, reliable college athlete performance data across six sports required building custom data pipelines and handling inconsistent formats across sources. Balancing analytics depth with simplicity — Local businesses don't want a complex dashboard. They want a simple answer: is this athlete worth partnering with? We had to design the product to be powerful under the hood but simple on the surface. Customer discovery in a fragmented market — Athletes, local businesses, collectives, and agents all have different pain points. Structuring discovery conversations to validate the problem across these segments took iteration.

What We Learned

The NIL market's biggest gap isn't demand — it's trusted price discovery Post-settlement regulation (House settlement, College Sports Commission oversight) has made defensible pricing a requirement, not a nice-to-have College athletes average a 5.6% engagement rate vs. 1.9% for traditional influencers, which means the value is there — it's just not being measured properly As of January 2026, 524 deals worth $14.94M were rejected by the College Sports Commission for lacking valid business purpose or fair pricing — confirming the market needs better infrastructure

What's Next

Our next milestone is proving that ReVal's scores improve real athlete-business matching. We plan to:

Run pilot campaigns with local Charlotte businesses to generate real ROI data Build athlete verification and ROI tracking features Deepen customer discovery to refine our scoring model Expand into compliance-ready campaign tools for agents, schools, and collectives

The long-term opportunity goes beyond scoring. As NIL matures, the platforms that win will be the ones that make athlete value easier to price, easier to trust, and easier to measure. ReVal is building that decision layer.

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