ATLANTA, June 22 (Hypepotamus) – Most startups spend years and marketing budget building a brand from nothing. Vettex Sports used its Georgia Tech connections to skip that step to build under a name that already had history.
The Create-X company was known until last year as LZRD Tech (Hypepotamus featured in 2020). It rebranded by partnering with its oldest distributor Markwort Sporting Goods, a family business run by three generations of Georgia Tech grads. Markwort had owned the Vettex name for years, building the brand mostly around mouthguards.
“When we partnered with them, building under the Vettex name made a lot of sense: we got to stand on a brand with real history in the space, and they got a partner ready to bring new products and a modern, tech-forward flare to it,” CEO Mike Pullen, told Hypepotamus. “There’s also something fitting about the Georgia Tech connection given where we got our start. It lets us pour our energy into the product and the athlete instead of building name recognition from zero.”
Building An Athletic Product Line
Today, that energy has turned into partnerships with more than 60 university and high school programs, including a partnership with Georgia Tech Athletics. Its products are also used by professional athletes.
Vettex has built out a line of products for football, baseball, and basketball, including grip gear, cooling gear, and dry gear that pulls away trapped sweat. The startup received a patent for its grip-enhancing textile in April of 2024.
Vettex’s newest product lines include baseball training equipment and a mouthguard that works with braces.
Deciding which products make it to market, Pullen said, comes down to working with a strict filter.
“It always starts with the athlete and a real problem worth solving. We pay attention to what our customers are asking for, where we see gaps in the market, and where we think we can build something genuinely better rather than just adding another SKU. From there it’s a question of whether we can hold our quality bar and whether the product fits the brand we’re building. We’d rather do a few things exceptionally well than flood the lineup, so a lot of ideas get cut. The ones that survive are the ones where we know we can make a meaningful difference for the person wearing it. Though we are a smaller company, we have tons of ideas for new products in the space, so we need to be very intentional with where we put our resources,” Pullen added.
Sports Gear Plus The Medical Field
On top of serving as CEO of Vettex Sports, Pullen is currently a medical student.
He said the two professional tracks inform each other more than people expect.
“My medical training and Vettex actually feed each other more than people expect. Studying the body—how it moves, how it performs, how it recovers—gives me a lens on product that most founders in this space don’t have. As I go further in medicine, I see Vettex evolving toward gear that’s not just about performance on the field but about supporting the athlete’s body in a smarter, more informed way. The discipline of medicine also keeps me rigorous: I want our claims to be real and our products to be backed by an understanding of how they actually affect the athlete. I think that intersection of sport and science is where Vettex is actually different.”