Betty Zhao (Questrom’25) and Farida Abdelmoneum are bringing data-driven insights to the tennis court with their startup, Epoch Labs. As co-founder and CEO, Betty handles the business side—finances, sales, marketing, and business development—while leveraging her background in finance and strategy from Questrom.
“Epoch Labs is trying to help bring more actionable insights to athletes, specifically in tennis first,” Betty explains. “We create a holistic AI tennis analytics solution powered by a singular portable camera.”
This single-camera solution delivers performance metrics, AI coaching feedback, injury prevention insights, and live streaming capabilities—all without requiring professional installation. Most importantly, it offers something existing technologies don’t: accuracy.
“The way this can help an athlete is to, first of all, give them accurate data,” Betty emphasizes. “We’ve talked to people who’ve tried other solutions, and they say, ‘There’s no way my swing was that fast.’ So first, we deliver accuracy so it’s reliable and they can measure their performance properly over time.”
Beyond performance tracking, Epoch Labs addresses another critical issue for athletes: injury prevention. “A big problem with athletes is that they get injured by overtraining or doing a form incorrectly,” Betty points out. “With our technology, we can help athletes correct incorrect forms so they can play longer on the courts.”
The idea didn’t emerge overnight. Betty and Farida explored several concepts before landing on tennis analytics. “When we started, this wasn’t the idea we started with,” Betty reveals. “We actually started with a generative AI idea, then we hopped over to a medical application, then to a ball machine, and finally to this smart camera solution for tennis.”
The pivotal moment came when they decided to leverage Farida’s extensive tennis background. Farida played competitively growing up with professional aspirations until COVID interrupted her trajectory. This firsthand experience proved invaluable in understanding the problems tennis players face.
Their research revealed growing demand—tennis participation in the US has increased over 30% from 2019 to 2023. After talking with top tennis coaches from Dartmouth and Princeton, they discovered widespread dissatisfaction with current analytics solutions.
“We realized that people wanted more data analytics,” Betty says, explaining their pivot from a ball machine to a camera-based solution. “We were also thinking in terms of expansion strategy. It’s hard to make a tennis ball machine—very R&D intensive, hardware intensive. So the idea is that our analytics would be differentiated from what’s out there, and we could apply it to other sports.”
Epoch Labs has assembled a talented team to bring their vision to life. Farida, who studied statistics and machine learning at CMU and interned at Google and Meta, leads the technical development. Their team members Judd, who specializes in ML, and Grace, a UX/UI designer, round out the group.
The startup has already secured partnerships with Dartmouth, Princeton, and Four Seasons Tennis Club for their pilot program. They’re building a waitlist as they seek funding to expand their reach.
Looking ahead, Betty has ambitious goals: “Ideally, we hope to be the standard for analytics and line calling for tennis and then sports beyond. After first targeting our B2B customers like tennis clubs and country clubs, we hope to be the official line caller for big tennis tournaments and then go into other sports.”
As finalists in the New Venture Competition, Epoch Labs stands at the threshold of transforming how athletes train, coaches teach, and tennis clubs operate—one accurate data point at a time.
