Thomas Rudy and leAD are paving the way for Lake Nona’s leadership in sports and health technology.
“Before I moved to Orlando, I made a spreadsheet of all the cities I wanted to live in and that I thought had futuristic value. It came down to Austin, Charlotte and Orlando, and I chose Orlando because I really loved it and I saw the opportunity there,” says Thomas Rudy, principal of the Lake Nona Fund, a venture capital investment vehicle that supports early-stage startups in the sports and health tech space.
This man knows how to pick champions, which is why as head of leAD’s Lake Nona Fund, he’s so effective at choosing which companies to back.
Since becoming a part of leAD Sports & Health Tech Partners, first as a mentor when leAD kicked off in 2017 in Berlin, Rudy has seeded emerging giants in three major areas of focus: fan engagement, health and wellness, and connected athletes. The goal is to make Lake Nona the global leader in sports and health technology by providing resources for startups and entrepreneurs to grow their businesses here.
Success = Hard Work + Serendipity
Born and raised in Germany, Rudy always had ambitions to come to the United States and study business. For his college education, he ended up in his dream environment, Columbia University in New York City, where he studied Economics and after graduating became an investment banker with Citigroup.
Assigned to the sports mergers and acquisitions division, Rudy worked on deals buying and selling teams from the world’s major sports leagues, including the Premier League in England.
But Rudy didn’t want to be a banker for the rest of his life. He’d always had an entrepreneurial itch that needed to be scratched.
“I’d saved some money of my own and wanted to invest it somewhere it could grow,” says Rudy. It was 2008, and financial literacy education was taking off due to the crisis on Wall Street and the following economic recession.
“I invested in a company that, at the time, was called Payoff.com. It was one of the very first financial technology companies, an area of business that has become very profitable ever since,” he says. “About two months ago, they reached ‘unicorn’ status — a startup that accrues a value of over $1 billion. It took 13 years, but we got there.”
With that pick, Rudy became a full-fledged venture capitalist while still staying close to the world of sports as his passion.
This intensity eventually led to his involvement with leAD Sports & Health Tech Partners.
leAD is the top sports and health tech investment ecosystem inspired by sports industry legend Adi Dassler, who founded the sports brand Adidas. After Dassler’s passing, his family chose to continue his legacy by investing in and fostering sports and health technology companies with the potential to change the world. During his days as a venture capitalist, Rudy served as a mentor in the leAD organization, guiding founders from ideation through the execution of their biggest ideas.
In 2020, after Rudy and his wife moved to Orlando, his role with leAD evolved. When leadership decided to launch a seed fund — now known as the Lake Nona Fund — to provide resources for the entrepreneurs shaping the future of sports and health technology, Rudy was uniquely qualified and the right man for the job due to his experience as an investment banker, a venture capitalist, and working in sports business and economics.
Real World Ideas Seeing Real World Success
Today, the Lake Nona Fund has invested in companies like Mustard, a biomechanics app that allows anyone to take a video of their baseball pitching motion and soon for a variety of sports and analyze their form and improve it. Mustard was founded by Dr. Tom House, a legendary pitching coach and also the throwing coach for Tom Brady, he is known as the “father of modern pitching mechanics.”
Suji is another athletic performance company seeded by the Lake Nona Fund. About the size of a blood pressure cuff, Suji is a device that restricts blood flow to a muscle in an arm or leg so that when an athlete trains, their body thinks they’re working harder than they really are, maximizing the efficiency of the athlete’s workout. The device links to the athlete’s phone, which offers a personalized profile that includes the best exercises, pressure calibration and custom workout settings.
TERSA is an AI-guided virtual physical therapy and training platform, chosen in the first cohort of leAD’s Lake Nona Sports & Health Tech Accelerator program. The platform has built-in cameras and movement assessment software to diagnose alignment and movement from the comfort of the home. The highly anticipated global product launch will take place in the coming months.
Between leAD’s experience in the sports and health spaces and Lake Nona’s globally recognized Sports, Human Performance and Life Sciences clusters along with it being a community built on a foundation of health, wellness and innovation, the marriage between the Fund, the startup accelerator and Lake Nona is made in heaven, and Thomas Rudy holds the keys to the pearly gates.
