Anil Chawla has done the whole founder journey in the Triangle before. Many readers will remember him as the Founder and CEO of Durham’s ArchiveSocial, a social media archiving platform for government.
He stepped out of the CEO role in 2019 amidst a $53M private equity deal (and in fact spoke with GrepBeat about the exit at the time). But he remained on the board of directors leading up to the company’s sale to CivicPlus in 2022.
Following that full exit in 2022, Chawla found himself with the free time he needed to pursue hobbies. More to the point, he picked up a tennis racket after having wielded one throughout his youth. And it was this return to sport that got him thinking about his next venture.
Chawla started prototyping a new platform in 2025 and earlier this year officially founded ShotSpin AI, a brand-new startup designed to bring pro-level video analysis to ordinary tennis players.
Returning to passion
Chawla grew up in a tennis family. With his father and brother both active in the sport, he started learning at a young age: picking up his first racket at five, taking lessons a few years later, and playing tournaments by age 10. Down the line, he enjoyed a successful high school career competing for state and regional titles.
But to paraphrase the film Moneyball, there comes a time for every athlete when they can no longer play the children’s game.
“I put down the racket when I went to college and went into the world of computer science and technology,” Chawla said. That journey continued when he graduated from Georgia Tech, moved to RTP to work for IBM, and ultimately got the entrepreneurial itch that led to the founding of ArchiveSocial.
Reflecting on his decade with the startup, Chawla said it had been amazing building a business that solved a real problem—but that it wasn’t in a “passion area.”
The exit enabled Chawla to pursue more personal interests again, and while the initial plan was to try some new hobbies, he quickly found that passion area back on the tennis courts. Because unlike baseball, which Moneyball affectionately calls “the children’s game,” tennis is something one can generally return to and keep playing.
“I picked up the racket and I just fell in deeply,” Chawla said.
“One of the neat things about tennis was, being an entrepreneur and being so motivated and self-driven all my life, I felt kind of lost having stepped out of running the company,” he added. “And tennis gave me this avenue to work on myself, to improve—to fail over and over again in a positive direction.”
Where this outlet ultimately led to the spark of a new startup idea was in Chawla’s use of existing apps to help him along in that “positive direction.” These apps offer various types of recording and shot-tracking to help players look back on their performance. But, while they were cool to use, Chawla was underwhelmed.
“The gap that I kept hitting was that I found the information interesting, but it didn’t help me improve.”
Essentially, these apps are effective at recording play and providing basic statistics such as where balls are landing, how many forehands a player might miss, etc. But they stop short of turning that information into meaningful analysis.
An analyst in your pocket
Using match footage and basic tracking like one can collect from the existing apps, some serious players (and even professionals in years past) will “chart” their matches. This essentially means taking raw data and grinding out analysis by hand to identify actionable trends or insights. ShotSpin is designed to modernize and fast-track that process.
“The realization was, AI makes it possible for us to do this in an automated fashion that’s highly effective, highly accurate, and can be scaled to the masses,” Chawla said.
“The vision is, the app is like an analyst in your pocket.”
With ShotSpin, all the player needs to do is set up a phone to film match play from a broadcast-style view (meaning at one end of the court or the other). From there, the platform does the rest.
“Our AI takes that video, breaks it down, understands exactly what’s happening in terms of where the ball is, where the players are, when it’s bouncing, when it’s hit…. Then it takes that information and makes it useful and actionable to the player.”
The difference this makes amounts to observation versus understanding.
Existing match trackers can tell any given player how many forehands they missed over the course of a match. Likewise, anyone who plays tennis regularly can have a given match after which they recognize, I really didn’t have my backhand today.
ShotSpin goes deeper. Within a single match, it can identify patterns that correlate with those missed forehands, such as deeper court position leading to errors. Across multiple matches, it will spot trends, such as how a bad backhand day actually compares to one’s overall play, and what made it so.
This is analysis akin to what’s available to high-level professionals but which most players around the world have not had access to. In that sense, ShotSpin aims to democratize a data-driven approach that supports real improvement.
Even so, Chawla noted that this is not meant to replace coaching. The platform is effectively identifying problems that need to be worked on, which it is then up to a player (and coach) to solve.
Building and testing ShotSpin AI
Chawla indicated that his own dabbling in AI following the ArchiveSocial exit, alongside the rapid improvement in AI in general, made it possible to build the product as he envisioned it. His own knowledge of the problem and technical background made him the right person for the project, and the capability of AI expedited the build.
With that said, the team is still taking its time to get things right.
At the time of this writing, ShotSpin is focused on perfecting match recording, clipping, and data gathering. The app is able to record full matches and then present them in two abbreviated forms: “Replay” (essentially a match stripped of downtime between points, cutting 60-90 miutes of tennis into roughly 15 minutes of pure play) and “Highlight Reel” (about a minute’s worth of highlights conveying how a match played out).
Aside from serving as the foundation for analysis, those videos fulfill a second purpose of the app: to make people enjoy tennis more.
QUICK BITS
Startup: ShotSpin AI
Founder: Anil Chawla
Founded: 2026
Team size: 3
Location: Durham
Website: shotspin.ai
Funding: Self-funded
Chawla understands that ShotSpin’s users aren’t likely bound for Wimbledon. But even without a professional future on the line, people want to improve at their hobbies and passions, and enjoying the process leads to that improvement.
By enabling users to share highlight reels, condensed matches, and eventually insights, ShotSpin aims to facilitate social connection that will help users enjoy the sport all the more.
The startup is currently working with a beta group to gather preliminary data and feedback before the analysis layer is built in later this year. Once that is available, the plan is to set up a straight-to-consumer, tiered freemium model—with some potential for additional models aimed at tennis clubs or programs.
Chawla invited any readers who play tennis to try out ShotSpin, and is particularly interested in hearing from those who have used other apps to record their play in the past.
