The new CHIP’d smart golf ball is set to revolutionise putting data
After nearly a decade operating in stealth mode, a sports technology company co-founded by Australian PGA professional Josh Marris is preparing to debut its first product: a smart golf ball built on IntelliCore, a patented, embedded IoT device designed to work across all major ball sports.
For CHIP’d, golf represents the ultimate proving ground, where challenges like symmetry, weight distribution, durability and manufacturing precision are most extreme. By solving for golf first, the company is setting a new benchmark for what’s possible in sports-performance tracking.
CHIP’d began in 2016 under Marris along with co-founders Anil Agarwal, Bob Angers and Tom Russell, semi-conductor industry veterans with deep expertise in mobile and embedded hardware. During the past few years, the team has quietly advanced the technology from a baseball-sized prototype to a regulation-weight golf ball with a fully integrated electronics core.
Backed by more than $1 million in funding since 2020, CHIP’d has solved complex engineering problems concerning miniaturisation, power efficiency, balance, communications and survivability, all within the unforgiving constraints of a golf ball.
“We didn’t just build a smart golf ball. We engineered a platform that works at the limits of physics,” Marris says. “Packing advanced electronics into a perfectly balanced ball that survives tour-level driver speeds was the moonshot. Now that we’ve hit that mark, we’re shifting gears towards manufacturing and delivering a high-performance putting product that’s intuitive, accurate and ready for real-world use.”
With its core technology proven and patents in place, CHIP’d is now preparing for its first product release: a performance-focused putting ball and companion mobile app that gives players and coaches unprecedented visibility into putting data. Unlike traditional systems that rely on external sensors or fixed-position cameras, CHIP’d captures data from inside the ball itself – tracking behaviour from impact to hole-out with unmatched precision.
“Systems like GC Quad are phenomenal at reading clubface and ball data at the point of impact, but they can’t tell you what the ball actually did,” Marris says. “We’re closing that loop, starting on the putting green. Powered by AI, our smart ball and app track the entire journey of the putt and use machine learning to determine whether the ball was holed or missed. From there, we unlock real performance data tied to distance, slope direction and consistency.
“Over time, we’ll be able to surface deeper insights like green speed, miss dispersion patterns and even the roll quality of different putting surfaces. This is about measuring every moment of the ball’s movement and translating that into meaningful feedback players and coaches can actually use.”
For coaches and players, this means putting practice is no longer guesswork. With CHIP’d, every session becomes measurable and purposeful, making every putt count and tracking how performance changes by distance, green conditions or which putter they use. Coaches can monitor a player’s practice habits remotely, identify trends in miss tendencies and design custom drills based on real data. For fitters and putting studios, the system provides a new layer of feedback, allowing them to evaluate how different putters, grips or green surfaces impact performance across a range of conditions.
CHIP’d’s smart putting ball is the first commercial application of IntelliCore, a proprietary technology platform that can be adapted to other sports, including baseball, basketball, football and hockey. The company’s long-term vision is to partner with major equipment manufacturers to bring smart-ball technology to the golf course and beyond. One of the top three global golf ball brands has already evaluated the CHIP’d technology under NDA, a clear signal of the industry’s interest in this emerging category. The company anticipates three granted patents this month, with additional filings pending.
“We want people to know this is real,” Marris says. “It’s not a concept or a hype video. It’s a working product and it’s ready for the world to see.”
