Vive Tennis is a compact, AI-powered robot that collects tennis balls while you play — so every minute on court is spent on the game, not on cleanup.
Recreational players lose up to 50% of their session bending, chasing and gathering. Court runners are expensive and rarely available. Existing tools are slow, bulky or built for clubs — not the player.
Tedious. Interrupts the game. Hard on aging knees and backs.
Expensive, only at premium clubs, and almost never available when you actually need one.
Still requires you to walk the court ball-by-ball. Saves your back, not your time.
Heavy, club-sized, expensive. You can't take them in your bag to a public court.
Vive Tennis is the first ball-collecting robot small enough to fit in a tennis bag — and smart enough to find, chase and capture balls on its own while you keep playing.
Locks onto balls up to 12 m away today — 30+ m on the roadmap.
Tossed in your kit. Set it courtside. Walks off the job by itself.
Jetson-class compute runs perception and path planning locally — no cloud, no lag.
Track shots, net-clearance and pace. Improve your game between rallies.
5 generations of iteration. Patents to be filed.
Tennis-yellow wheels. Designed for hardcourt and clay.
Four steps from courtside chaos to a clean baseline. The robot handles the rest.
Place Vive on the court. One button. No tethering, no setup.
Cameras scan the court and lock onto every visible ball in seconds.
The robot plans the shortest path and rolls each ball into its hopper.
When you call it, Vive returns to your bench and waits for the next set.
Tennis is a $20B+ global sport with passionate, high-income recreational players who already pay for premium racquets, club memberships and coaching. Vive sits squarely inside that wallet.
Our beachhead is the recreational mature player — 35+, club member, owns a $200+ racquet, wears a connected fitness device. The exact customer who already pays for a better game.
Four co-founders and a team of eight. Two former RoboCup champions on the engineering side; industrial design from Nike & Home Depot alumni; global manufacturing across China, Turkey and the UAE.
Co-founder · AI & Robotics
PhD in AI & Computer Vision (France). Former RoboCup champion. Leads perception and autonomy.
Co-founder · Hardware
Electrical Engineering, Tehran Polytechnic. Former RoboCup champion. Owns the electromechanical stack.
Co-founder · Manufacturing
Manufacturing and supply chain across China, Turkey and the UAE. Brings hardware from prototype to production.
Co-founder · Product & Investor
Serial entrepreneur. Founding investor. Shapes product strategy and the go-to-market plan.
Operations & People
Team management and operations. Keeps the engine running so the engineers can build.
Head of Sales
20 years leading sales for international trading companies in China. Channel and B2B partnerships.
UI / UX Design
Burlington, ON. Previously Canadian Tire and the Best Athletes sports-analytics app.
Industrial Design
15+ years in industrial design with Nike and Home Depot. Owns the physical experience of Vive.
We're hiring engineers, designers and operators who want to ship real hardware into the hands of millions of players. Small team, big ownership, working alongside RoboCup champions and seasoned industrial designers.
Every quarter, units leave the lab and enter players' bags.
In-person engineering on prototypes; remote-friendly for software and ops.
Meaningful stock options for every full-time hire — we share the upside.
Own ball-detection & tracking on Jetson-class hardware. CV, deep-learning, sensor fusion.
ApplyDesign the gripper and drive system through the next two generations. Prototyping mandatory.
ApplyFirmware for motor control, sensor I/O and OTA updates. C/C++, RTOS, motor drivers.
ApplyCMF, ergonomics and DFM for the shipping unit. Work alongside our Nike/Home Depot alum.
ApplyDrive the crowdfunding launch and waitlist conversion. Paid + community + creator partnerships.
ApplyHelp run the lab, manage suppliers, ship units. Open to current undergrads in Canada.
ApplyDon't see a fit? We're always open to exceptional engineers and designers.
Send a general applicationEngineering notes, design diaries and field tests from the team building Vive Tennis.
Company
10 units in 2023. 32 in 2024. 266 in 2025. We just crossed 300 Vives in players' hands. A retrospective on what 8× year-over-year growth actually feels like in a hardware company — what broke, what surprised us, and what we're doing differently for the next 1,000.
Engineering
Training an on-device perception model to detect yellow balls under court lighting, shadow and motion blur — and getting 30 FPS out of a Jetson-class board.
Hardware
A short visual history of the capture mechanism — from a 3D-printed scoop to the production unit we're filing patents on.
Hardware
Designing a 90-minute battery pack that survives a Toronto summer afternoon on hardcourt — and why we over-built the heat sink twice.
Design
The CMF brief: choosing a chartreuse the eye reads as "tennis ball" without making the product look like a toy.
Company
Why we incorporated in Canada under the Start-Up Visa Program, how the lab is structured, and what we're hiring for first.
Company
What we looked for, how we screened CMF portfolios, and why the right hire reshaped the entire production unit.
Research
What we heard from 20 club members and weekend players. The pickup-pain was real — but so were the surprises about what they would and wouldn't pay for.
Company
Three hardware prototypes, two pivots in the capture mechanism, 32 units shipped in 2024 (42 lifetime), and one big lesson about scoping a hardware MVP we wish we'd learned a year earlier.
Company
How we're structuring the Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaigns launching in 2026 — the timeline, the tiers, the creative, and the unit economics that have to work.
Engineering
What broke when we took the lab prototype outside: glare, asphalt cracks, dust, and one curious labrador. A field log.
Operations
We assembled prototypes in three countries before settling on the split between Canadian R&D and Asian high-volume manufacturing. Here's the math.
Engineering
How we got real-time ball detection running on a budget embedded board — and the model-pruning tricks that bought us another 8 FPS.
Hardware
What we learned tearing down v1 — the geometry that picked up clay, the spring rate that didn't, and the part we ended up redesigning four more times.
Company
The first post. Why four engineers and operators put real money into a tennis-ball-collecting robot, and what we believe the next ten years of personal sport robotics will look like.
The questions players, partners and investors ask us most. Don't see yours? Get in touch.
Direct-sale units typically ship within 3–4 weeks of order. We've delivered 308 Vives since 2023 — 10 in 2023, 32 in 2024, 266 in 2025 — and are scaling production through 2026.
Vive is designed for hardcourt and clay. We're field-testing on indoor carpet and synthetic grass; the current generation handles them, but they aren't a launch focus.
One full session — roughly 90 minutes of active play and collection on a single charge. The robot autonomously returns to its dock when battery is low.
Yes. The robot uses computer-vision obstacle avoidance and stays out of active rally zones. It pauses motion when a player crosses its planned path.
We're piloting with select clubs in 2026. If you operate a club or academy and want to be on the pilot list, email hello@vivetennis.com.
Designated organizations, angel groups and VC partners can request the full data room — pitch deck, financials, IP and team CVs — at invest@vivetennis.com.
Vive Tennis is establishing its headquarters and R&D operations in Canada under the federal Start-Up Visa Program. We are building a Canadian robotics company — designing in Canada, manufacturing globally, and selling worldwide.
Direct sales are open at $599 CAD — one-time payment, lifetime ball caddy. Drop your details and we'll send a checkout link within one business day. Units typically ship within 3–4 weeks.
Investors, partners, clubs, coaches and press — reach the founding team directly.