In the summer of 2012, Will Ahmed (College ’12) had recently founded WHOOP and was working on prototypes of a fitness and health tracker for athletes at the Harvard Innovation Labs. 14 years later, WHOOP has emerged as one of the world’s most popular health and performance wearables. The company just announced it has more than 2.5 million members around the world, from the most recognizable names in sports to everyday people who want to live "healthier, longer lives and unlock extraordinary potential.”
Throughout his journey in scaling WHOOP, Ahmed has been a proponent of Massachusetts as a great place to start and scale a tech company. In January 2026, he took the company’s advocacy to a new level, announcing WHOOP as the founding chair of the Massachusetts AI Coalition, an initiative aimed at cementing Massachusetts as a global hub for AI startups and innovation.
It's only fitting, then, that in 2026 another Harvard student is at the Harvard Innovation Labs prototyping a sports tech product for athletes. Andrew Morrissey ’26, a Harvard College senior from Southern Maine, is the founder of Praxis, an AI-powered golf coaching system that Morrissey envisions will make real-time, personalized instruction accessible to all golfers.
We caught up with Morrissey to learn more about the development of Praxis, the technical challenges he's been tackling, and what comes next.
One Lesson Leads to One Big Idea
"Praxis is an AI golf coach," Morrissey says. "It's a real-time personal golf coach for golfers, especially youth golfers, to lower the cost barrier to entry to the sport, and also allow amateur golfers to get coaching whenever they want and however they want."
Before his junior year, Morrissey had been working on an AI personal trainer for the gym. Then he visited his grandfather at a golf course in Pennsylvania, who gave him his first real lessons and told him that, with a few more sessions, he could be a good player. The problem? Back home in rural Maine, the municipal course he was playing on had no instructor on staff.
"With the emergence of AI, I realized that one of the best things AI is good at is teaching," Morrissey says. "That can apply very easily to something like sports coaching, as long as you give the model a set of eyes."
Rethinking What Golf Coaching Looks Like
Golf simulators have been a fixture of the industry for years, but Morrissey pointed out that simulated play and actual coaching are different things. AI coaching apps represent a closer comparison since they use camera setups to analyze your swing, but even those feel fragmented to him.
"You set it up on a tripod, hit record, walk over, hit a ball, walk back, stop recording, and then it processes over some time and gives you feedback," he says. "It's similar, but it's not what I'm picturing. I want something a lot more integrated into the practice flows of golfers already."
Morrissey envisions a player arriving at the driving range, and having a system that talks to you throughout your session. It would be a seamless, conversational coaching experience rather than a series of disconnected video reviews.
Teaching a Machine to See a Swing
Morrissey's first prototype delivers real-time conversational coaching by analyzing a golfer's body mechanics as they swing — no pausing, no walking back to a screen, no waiting for feedback. One of the biggest technical challenges in getting there has been building accurate 3D body motion modeling. Existing open-source neural networks can produce 3D models from 2D images, but they aren’t built for the kind of precision Praxis requires to understand the nuances of a golf swing across multiple planes of motion.
“These models aren’t really built for that per se, and so it's been difficult, but I've worked around it to combine them into a hybrid model that gets there."
The result is a system that tracks body movement and delivers feedback mid-session, the way a human coach standing next to you would.
Morrissey has gotten a boost along the way from the Harvard Grid’s Applied AI cohort program, which awarded him AWS cloud credits to help offset the significant computing demands of the platform.
All In on Building After Graduation
Much like Ahmed, Morrissey plans to keep building full-time after he graduates this spring.
"This is my only plan," he says. "I haven't applied to a single job."
That kind of conviction doesn't emerge in a vacuum, and Morrissey is candid about the role the i-lab community has played in shaping it. He specifically mentioned the i-lab's network of advisors, who have helped him think through everything from the technical architecture of the platform to the longer-term question of how to build a company around it.
When asked where he’ll grow the business, Morrissey is clear that he wants to keep building in New England. Staying local, he hopes to tap into the tech ecosystem that helped Ahmed turn a prototype into a global tech brand.
