The Pitch: Brooks Koepka’s ex-manager leads Irish golf tech revolution
Thomas Hackett, Co-Founder and CEO of Platform Golf, and Rory Flanagan, Co-Founder and CCO of Platform Golf
N two weeks at the PGA Show in Orlando, a Dublin solicitor will gather with his co-founder and business partners at Stand 672 to showcase the most technologically advanced product to be unleashed in the business of golf.
The launch, at the world’s largest and longest running golf commerce event, will formally announce the arrival of Platform Golf and its multi-layered assembly of technologies and solutions which will change the way the game is coached.
Through its fully patented hardware, software, and physical putting and hitting surface, the tech has already secured the investment and partnership of some of the world’s best instructors, who teach the best players ever to have struck a ball.
Brad Faxon (Rory McIlroy), Claude Harmon III (Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson), David Orr (Justin Rose), and Stephen Sweeney (Colin Morikawa, Shane Lowry) — who all feature in Golf Digest’s ‘Top 50 Best Teachers’ — have already backed the product.
Other key endorsements have come from Erika Larkin, Kevin Weeks, Michael Hunt, and Darren May. They are among the top-tier coaches who have partnered with Platform to support a product they believe will not just improve their players but their own coaching environments.
So what is this bit of tech that’s got the professionals behind the professionals in such a lather?
Platform Golf is a putting and full-swing turf mat which mimics all types of grasses and conditions. It sits on an aluminium base and is controlled through dynamic technologies to create slopes and undulations for all types of putts and golf shots.
It presents desired conditions and gradients, allowing for practice on down and upslope conditions, and manufacturing raised and tilted greens as desired.
Effectively it gives the coach and student whatever desired scenario they need to work on or whatever requires focus and instruction, based on past shots or upcoming conditions that the player may face.
forecasts that it will become a fixed and necessary tool for the 30,000 USPGA coaches in the US, NCAA instructors across the US College system, and instructors around the world.
And it’s not just for those at the top of the game.
For around €20,000, rising to €40,000, Platform Golf not only belongs in the Clinic, but it is also the ultimate mancave toy for high-net individuals, to practise or entertain on, all in an indoor environment.
Platform Golf co-founder Rory Flanagan is the chief marketing and commercial officer with the company, which began initially as a concept called Perfection Platforms to improve putting, but has evolved into full-swing capabilities.
Flanagan and co-founder Thomas Hackett have been working on the product for more than a decade — indeed David Orr has had a prototype model at his Flatstick Academy in North Carolina for almost 10 years.
Platform initially wanted to create a realistic putting platform which would bend and shape to the coach’s and player’s needs, but through layers of extra investment has evolved to s 360-degree training solution.
Playing Tralee at the
weekend, and you don’t fancy the 16th, well then recreate its slope in advance through the platform’s databank of dimensions from every key course, green, and hole from around the world.
The use of technology and hard materials allows for a consistency of roll and break to give professionals and
recreational players the conditions they desire, actuating the maximum break possible.
In other words it will bring to an end, for golf instructors, the reliance only on flat surfaces for practice sessions, instead building and creating every ‘ball lie’ scenario there is.
So innovative and unique was the concept, and ultimately the tech itself, that David Shapiro — co-founder of KPS Capital, a private equity firm that manages in excess of $14bn of investments including TaylorMade — was an early funder.
Along with the USPGA and NCAA coaches who have come on board, and who will flock to Stand 672 in Florida towards the end of the month, additional interest is pouring in from the Middle East, and particularly emerging golf giant Saudi Arabia.
The company is also building a strong list of partners through formal agreements with monster brands like TaylorMade and Cobra, and there are ongoing conversations with the likes of Titleist and Callaway.
“We’re not really in quick sale mode,” Flanagan told this week, ahead of the launch in the US.
“At the moment we’re focused on partnerships and building relationships with coaches or the pros behind the pros.
“If you hit the range at Wentworth say, you might have 50 players and you will have 50 guys behind them, then 300 or more (spectators behind them) — so we’re really focused on the ones in the middle (the coaches).
“The PGA pro is the backbone behind US golf,” Flanagan says. Take out the world’s leading coaches and consider the tens of thousands of USPGA professionals or College and University instructors who are “under resourced and under-utilised”.
“These coaches, their clubs, clients, and students are handcuffed with geography and location, and this allows them not to be limited just with someone down the road.”
Such flexibility allows not just for additional “cool digital products” but is also something that has mass appeal to the golfing “tech nerds”.
Flanagan has no doubt that he, his partners, and investors are onto something that’s not only transformational, but also revolutionary across the game of golf.
“We’re the platform transforming golf, but also integrating with our partners and complementing what they have to offer.”
Such complex technology and solution solving takes time. “It has taken us about nine years to become this overnight success,” jokes Flanagan.
His own trajectory is moulded in his early days as manager to Brooks Koepka, when the four-time Major winner decided to come through the European Challenge Tour and into the DP World Tour to begin his journey to the top of the world game.
The lawyer joined Hambric Sports Group, the agency which looks after Koepka, and quickly rose to player manager and onto VP/head of operations, where he helped the future world No.1 adapt to life on the European Tour.
For Koepka there were many things to navigate in Europe, not least the change in lifestyle but also the vagaries of playing in rain gear — he and Flanagan have remained friends to this day.
However, behind the scenes a greater calling attracted Flanagan with Perfection Platforms, which he and Hackett founded in 2014.
As well as Shapiro, the company has encouraged multi-million-dollar funding from a host of investors including Keith Bank of KB Partners with additional SPV formed in the US by Liquidity Ventures and internationally via Circle Rock Capital.
A now fully fledged fulfilment, hardware, and software company, Platform operates out of New York and Dublin with just 11 staff (which will undoubtedly surge) and aims to be cashflow positive by the middle of 2025.
It has only been able, and will only be able, to achieve such ambitious goals, says Flanagan, if it focuses on “people, product, and practice”.
“Platform Golf is going to change how golf is trained and coached,” he says with a certainty that comes from so much buy-in, interest, and endorsement from the top of the golf and financial sectors.
And all of this before it has even been launched.
The Jockey Club this week announced entries for three key races at this year’s Cheltenham Festival worth a total of £1.4m (€1.68m).
The standout from the early declarations for the Boodles Cheltenham Golf Cup, BETMGM Queen Mother Chase and Ryanair Chase is the sheer weight of entries from Irish horses, which make up the majority of each field.
Out of the 19 entries for the Gold Cup 13 are Irish trained with one French horse battling it out for the £625,000 (€754,000) purse.
The £400,000 (€482,000) BetMGM Queen Mother Champion Chase (Grade 1) features 15 Irish from the 26 total entries, with one France.
While the £375,000 (€452,000) Ryanair Chase sees 34 entries, with 18 Irish trained and, once more, one from France.
We will evaluate the gulf in class and standards between Irish and UK racing in the lead-up to Cheltenham, but already it’s beginning to look like a market which will be totally dominated by Ireland.
