As AI continues to reshape the entertainment and sports industries, newly founded sports technology companies are claiming that athletes are becoming contributors to the AI economy, and there is no standardized system to complement them.
Callandor Group has announced what it calls the first purpose-built registry for sports intellectual property in the AI era. The platform is designed to give athletes and sports organizations the tools to manage, protect and profit from their digital identities, which the company says are increasingly being fed into AI systems without compensation or consent.
“Right now, there is a star IP like this. [Lionel] Messi or LeBron [James] “Their movement, voice and biometric data is being fed into AI models with zero transparency and no standardized loyalty system,” said Michael Fisk, CEO of Callandor. Athletes are no longer just players, they are training data for the next generation of digital entertainment. ”
Fisk, a veteran entertainment executive with stints at Sony, MGM and Amazon Studios, will lead the company alongside co-CEO David Cassidy and CTO Anh Vu. Vu, a former engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked on the Mars rover Perseverance, is developing what the company calls the “Event Horizon API” to secure AI queries and protect athlete data. Cassidy, who served as executive producer on Michael Mann’s Ferrari and brought links to Europe’s top five soccer leagues, is focused on bringing elite clubs and players to the platform.
The core of Callandor’s service allows athletes to license their digital identities and collect royalties when AI systems use their likeness and performance data. For clubs and content studios, it provides a route to commercialize video libraries as training materials for AI developers while complying with European Union AI laws and California transparency laws.
“As the sports world evolves into a software-driven entertainment business, Callandor is the infrastructure that will ensure our stars actually own the future they are building,” Fisk said. “For the industry as a whole, this provides a clear and compliant path to move from broadcasting rights to training rights.”
The company has appointed Phil McKenzie as strategic advisor. MacKenzie co-founded Goldfinch, a financial company that has invested more than £300 million ($397 million) into more than 300 projects, and myco.io, a platform that boasts 40 million users and sales partnerships with the English Premier League and the International Cricket Council.
“Sports IP licensing is where entertainment credit financing was 15 years ago. There was tremendous underlying asset value and there was no standardized infrastructure to unlock it,” McKenzie said. “Calandore is building that infrastructure layer.”
European soccer is the company’s main target market, and Callander cited the global audience commanded by the big five leagues and the regulatory tailwind created by the EU AI law as conditions supporting a compliant approach. The company’s team also includes Guglielmo Caldente, and the company says Roberto Mancini’s achievements and connections with F1 will give him access to top clubs in European football. Calandor further stated that it has a partnership with FC Barcelona’s digital divisions Barça Media, Barça One and Barça Digital Assets, which are involved in promoting the theatrical release of the FIFA Club World Cup.
“By tracking and licensing AI queries related to sports IP, we build a scalable and durable revenue model,” said Fisk. “Athletes are new code. If athletes are software, we’re creating an app store.”
