Arkero, a Seattle-area startup leveraging AI to help professional sports teams streamline business operations, has expanded its reach in English soccer by landing Bolton Wanderers FC as its latest client.

The agreement builds on momentum for Arkero, which was launched last fall by the co-founder of Seattle digital remittance company Remitly and raised $6 million at the start of this year.

Bolton Wanderers — which earned promotion back to the English Championship in May — joins a client roster that includes Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders FC, NWSL’s Seattle Reign FC, MLS expansion team San Diego FC, and fifth-tier English side Southend United.

The project with Bolton centers on a three-month effort to overhaul the team’s data infrastructure and build a custom “club intelligence layer.” Designed to connect directly to Bolton’s internal data, systems, and workflows, the platform centralizes organizational knowledge so staff across business and football operations can query information and deploy practical AI tools and agents.

“AI transformation does not begin with a chatbot. It begins with a club’s data, systems, knowledge and workflows,” said Shivaas Gulati, founder and CEO of Arkero, in a news release on Friday. “The future football workplace will bring experienced people and AI systems together. Bolton has approached this work with real ambition.”

Gulati’s drive to apply AI to sports comes directly from his own ties to the game. He serves on the ownership group of Southend United and previously acted as a technical advisor to Sounders FC on its tech and AI strategy.

“We get to see the real problems inside sports teams given our access to Southend United,” Gulati told GeekWire. “Clubs have been doing things the same way for a long time, and with AI they can truly re-imagine how their workforce operates and adapts to the demands of a modern enterprise.”

A longtime angel investor, Gulati co-founded Remitly in 2011 and left in 2022. He launched Arkero with help from Vamsi Narla, who leads product and engineering, and Daniel Shi, who oversees business operations. The startup has eight full-time employees.

Based in Greater Manchester, Bolton Wanderers boasts a rich legacy as one of the 12 founding members of the English Football League in 1888. Originally formed in 1874 as Christ Church F.C., the historic club has won four FA Cups and spent over 70 seasons in English football’s top flight.

Bolton CEO David Ray said the club is making a long-term investment to ensure it isn’t “playing catch-up” as technology reshapes the sports industry. The club aims to use Arkero’s platform to drive revenue, streamline administrative tasks, and better engage fans — joining teams like the Sounders and Reign, which project over 50% efficiency savings in matchday planning using the startup’s tools.

Arkero says interest in its deep AI integration model is accelerating across the sports world. The startup is currently in discussions with multiple English Football League clubs as well as professional sports teams and leagues across Europe and North America, as leadership teams seek to move beyond generic AI tools and connect AI directly to their proprietary data and daily workflows.

“There is a window right now for forward-thinking clubs to build a meaningful advantage,” Gulati said. “In a few years, working alongside AI will simply be how professional sports organizations operate.”

Most tech workers are used to keeping multiple projects up in the air at once. Cory Black took the concept to a literal level.

A graduate of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and a former software engineer at Facebook, Black left his career behind to run away and join the circus.

Today, the work he’s juggling mostly involves soccer balls. Black, a 30-year-old from Bellevue, Wash., is one of the premier soccer freestylists in the world, doing things with his feet and hands that will leave you shaking your head.

Black is fresh off earning a bronze medal at the 2026 International Jugglers’ Association Championships in Fort Wayne, Ind., where he competed against top talent from Japan, Taiwan, and across the U.S.

His 5-minute routine (below) stood out by blending traditional hand-toss juggling with elite soccer freestyle — a rare combination he built over 16 years of kicking a soccer ball around and 11 years of hands-on juggling training.

It all started when he was 14 years old and playing youth soccer.

“My dad challenged me to juggle 100 times with my feet for $100,” Black told GeekWire. “Of course, that’s a ton of money when you’re a kid, so that’s all I did for a few weeks, and I got the money. Then I just started learning some tricks on YouTube and fell in love with learning the next one and next one, and figured out that it was a sport all to itself.”

Black quit traditional soccer in high school to focus entirely on freestyle, traveling to L.A. for his first U.S. Championships at age 16 and later heading to the World Championships in the Czech Republic. Unlike standard field play, soccer freestyle operates more like a breakdance battle, with competitors going head-to-head on stage to impress a panel of judges.

When it came time for college, Black followed his older brother to UW to study computer science at the Allen School. He spent his free time practicing tricks, but at the time, he didn’t view freestyle as a viable full-time career — most of his role models were just booking occasional corporate gigs for brands like Nike or Adidas.

After an internship in Silicon Valley, Black landed a full-time job as a software engineer at Facebook’s (now Meta’s) South Lake Union office in Seattle, where he spent three and a half years working on such things as content monetization tools for creators.

Juggling remained a constant backdrop to his engineering work; he kept juggling balls on his desk, tried teaching his teammates how to juggle, and practiced high tricks after hours in the office lounge. While training at a Seattle circus school, Black struck up a friendship with a former Cirque du Soleil choreographer who saw stage potential in his moves.

“After showing some of my tricks, he told me, ‘Hey, you can make this into a circus act,’ which I had never even imagined,” Black said. “I saw the opportunity … you can actually work with a circus and live with a circus and have a recurring way to support yourself.”

Black took the leap, leaving Facebook to spend six to eight months building a full, stage-ready routine with his choreographer. To stretch his savings during the training period, he slept on his brother’s floor in Seattle for a year and a half before landing his first circus contract. That led to two years on the road with Flynn Creek Circus, living in a caravan and performing as a featured act.

After two seasons living on the road, Black transitioned into performing as a solo artist, booking corporate events, private shows, and local festivals. That solo pivot paid off big this past summer when Seattle hosted FIFA World Cup matches. Black stayed busy performing 28 separate shows across the city in six weeks, including fan events at Pacific Place Mall and outside the stadium for all six games. He made most of his money for the year during the stretch.

While moving from software engineering to stage performance brought a steep learning curve, Black sees surprising parallels between coding and juggling. He says engineers and jugglers are both drawn to complex patterns that have specific numbers associated with them. Managing five balls in the air fits that bill.

“If you go to local juggling clubs anywhere, there’s an unusually high amount of software people and engineers,” Black said. “Part of it is just being able to tackle hard, frustrating problems. If you haven’t gotten used to banging your head against a wall until you get something, you’re going to give up fairly easily.”

Black does occasionally lean on his engineering skills for side work. He broke his foot in December and took on what he calls “software adjacent” work. He’s also helped build websites for circus friends. But he has no interest in trading his soccer balls for a return to a tech desk job.

“Right now, I don’t plan on going back at all,” Black said. “Also, I don’t know what the landscape looks like after AI has kind of gone through everything.”

For now, he’s perfectly content sticking to debugging physical tricks on stage — where the only glitches in the code are the occasional dropped ball.

What does Jeff Bezos’ new ownership stake in English Premier League powerhouse Liverpool FC mean for the storied soccer club?

I was invited by Dan Clubbe of the Liverpool fan site The Redmen TV to talk about the Amazon founder’s recent investment, Bezos’ first real foray into sports ownership.

Across the 45-minute discussion, I shared thoughts about Bezos’ transformation from the nerdy, khaki-wearing entrepreneur of his early career to the higher-profile “Buff Bezos” of the past decade.

On the surface, it appears as if Bezos will, for now, take an arm’s-length approach to Liverpool. He’s investing through a consortium, 1892 Holdings, that owns about a 38% interest in the team and an option to buy it outright.

One point I made: Bezos leads a very busy life. The sci-fi nerd’s true passion is his space company, Blue Origin, and he is also spending considerable time as the co-CEO at newly formed AI startup Prometheus. And with a new wife (Lauren Sanchez Bezos, who seems to be the true sports fan between them) there may not be enough hours in the day for the Miami resident to worry much about the inner workings at Anfield.

But Bezos does bring enormous capital and business acumen to the team.

To better understand what this might mean for Liverpool, I suggested Clubbe and his mighty team of reporters take a closer look at Amazon’s famous Leadership Principles.

Some of the most relevant Leadership Principles include “Ownership,” which asks leaders to think long term and not trade lasting value for a quick result; “Customer Obsession,” which means starting with what the customer wants and working backward; and “Insist on the Highest Standards,” setting the bar higher than most people think reasonable.

That said, the Amazon principle of “Frugality” doesn’t really play well these days on the world soccer stage.

We talked about the changing nature of global soccer, driven by big personalities and big money, and the balancing act it takes to build a soccer club while respecting the community of fans. I noted how this tightrope was a hard one for Bezos to walk in terms of his relationship to Amazon’s hometown of Seattle, something that might give Liverpool fans pause.

Watch highlights from the discussion above, and subscribe to The Redmen TV for our full discussion. Listen to a much shorter analysis on last week’s GeekWire podcast.