There are some founders who believe that all good ideas must originate exclusively from within their own minds. Haniff Brown is not one of those founders.
In 2024, the Williams College mathematics major and former private equity investor was actively promoting his company, Fit:match, and its artificial intelligence body-scanning technology primarily as a solution to help retail shoppers find clothing that actually fit their unique proportions. Then, a major English soccer team reached out with an unusual proposition: Would Brown bring the technology to their youth academy for an entirely different application? At first, he almost said no, assuming the software had a singular purpose. Instead, he decided to go anyway. By listening closely to the coaches, scouts, and sports scientists on the ground, he uncovered an entirely different use for the tech—and unlocked a much larger, more lucrative business in the process.
Today, Fit:match partners with powerhouse sports organizations including FIFA, Major League Soccer, and Major League Baseball, delivering athletes a comprehensive set of anthropometric and body-composition measurements in a matter of seconds. Brown recently spoke to discuss his insights and advice on building, growing, and seizing unexpected opportunities in competitive markets.
Let’s start with the elevator pitch. What is Fit:match?
Fit:match operates as a body intelligence platform. To put it into perspective for the modern digital age, think of us almost like the ChatGPT, the Claude, or the Gemini of the human body. We provide remote access to body intelligence and advanced body analytics at scale. Consequently, whenever hospitals, professional sports teams, coaches, or other enterprises require precision data analytics concerning the human body, we are the company that supplies that capability across the board.
Talk to us about the pivot from your tech focusing on people buying clothing.
The transition began around 2024 when we received a call from a prominent sports team based in England. At the time, we were conducting operations within a retail environment, and their representatives reached out to say they genuinely appreciated our technology. They understood it was primarily utilized for shopping, but they asked if we could visit their youth academy located out in the English countryside.
Initially, our instinct was to decline because the technology had been engineered and built for a specific commercial purpose. However, sometimes as an entrepreneur, you simply have to take a measured risk and follow your gut intuition. I thought to myself, why not see what they have in mind?
When I arrived at the academy, I engaged in deep conversations with the coaches, the scouts, and the sports scientists on staff. That interaction served as the definitive aha moment for our company. What they communicated to me during that visit was that if we could streamline and accelerate the body-scanning process down to a mere 10 to 15 seconds, it would unlock an enormous strategic advantage for them. In professional sports, most physical assessments traditionally take a significant amount of time and frequently require pulling an athlete away from essential training regimens. When I returned from that trip, I knew immediately that we were going all-in on this new direction.
You’re a die-hard Manchester United fan—how does it feel to build a business around something you love?
What brings me the greatest amount of happiness is the realization that whether we are working with Major League Baseball or Major League Soccer, we are deploying this technology at the youth level. When you are able to democratize this kind of advanced technology in the right way, you gain the ability to reach a larger population of youth athletes. This helps develop new ecosystems and pathways for athletic development that simply do not exist today, while simultaneously providing valuable health and physical data to parents so they can make better, more informed decisions for the well-being of their sons and daughters.
For entrepreneurs, how important is it to put your product in people’s hands to experience it?
There are typical entrepreneurs, and then there are founders who are actively trying to build something that fundamentally does not yet exist. I firmly place myself in the latter category. A major part of this entrepreneurial journey for me has not merely been proving that the underlying technology actually works; it has also involved proving to enterprises, broader markets, and everyday consumers that this is a capability they can seamlessly integrate into their routines.
A substantial component of how I have tackled market adoption is by putting the technology directly into the hands of users as frequently as possible. The more hidden your product remains behind closed doors or complex sales pitches, the more obstacles you inevitably have to face during the selling journey. Consequently, during every single client call I conduct now—whether I am speaking with representatives from the Cleveland Clinic or a professional sports team located in Peru—I always initiate the conversation with a live demonstration of the technology.
I avoid relying on pre-recorded videos or static pictures. Instead, we have someone from our team hop directly onto the video call, take out their iPhone, capture four quick photos, and run through the entire technology process live. I do this intentionally because I want to educate the person on the other side of the screen that the process is remarkably easy. It is an experience that I always tell people can be effortlessly performed by my eight-year-old son or my 70-year-old mother. Ultimately, I have found that the return on investment and the overall payback of putting the actual product out there in real-time has been exceptionally high.
What’s your advice to founders out there seeking funding?
I have been fairly open and transparent about this topic in the past. To be candid, I do not particularly enjoy fundraising. I genuinely enjoy building innovative products, scaling talented teams, and having fun on the operational side of the business. Therefore, I view the fundraising process almost as if you are driving a car on a long road trip from Los Angeles to New York, and somewhere along the highway, you realize you are going to break down and run out of fuel. You simply need a gas station somewhere along the journey to keep moving forward.
Fundraising functions much like those gas stations. It is neither the ultimate means nor the final end—it is merely the fuel you require to reach the next stage of development and successfully execute your broader business journey. If I focus on building the right product, establishing the right market fit, and acquiring customers who are actively paying for our services, I will naturally find the right investor.
What I frequently observe is that many entrepreneurs make the mistake of focusing intensely on fundraising first, while treating product development and customer acquisition as secondary priorities. In my experience, fundraising actually becomes significantly easier once you have already solved those foundational business challenges. Therefore, my primary advice to emerging founders is to concentrate heavily on the core elements that investors genuinely want to see proven out in the market.
