Brad Faxon Backs Platform Golf’s Bid To Nix Sim Golf’s Pain Point

Brad Faxon and Thomas Hackett chat during a demonstration of Platform Golf’s technology during the Open Championship

Platform Golf

Few golfers appreciate the power of visualization more than Brad Faxon. The Furman University product’s career peak came later than most, between ages 35 and 40, when he led the PGA Tour in putting average three times (1996, 1999, and 2000). The breakthrough came following the opening of Scotty Cameron’s putter studio, giving the Titleist staffer his first close-up look at his stroke and fresh insight into just exactly how the ball rolled off the face of his favorite club in the bag.

“That was the first time I had seen my putting stroke, seen the ball leave the putter face in super slow motion and the first time I’d really practiced indoors to get fitted for a putter,” Faxon explained. “My putting stats went through the roof.”

He has no doubt that if he’d had access to Platform Golf back then, he probably would have ended up with more hardware in his trophy collection. The company, which takes simulator visualization a meaningful step forward, has just named Faxon ‘tour ambassador.’

Golf simulators strive to replicate the outdoor experience to a tee. In just milliseconds high speed photometric and stereoscopic cams lock onto a ball’s launch window, crunching critical data points—ball speed, spin rate, launch angle and clubhead position through impact, among other variables.

Next, computational physics software takes the wheel, projecting where a shot would have apexed, landed, and rolled to had it been struck from a real tee box instead of just smacking into an impact screen. Finally, vivid course graphics and shot-tracing overlays kick in, completing the illusion of playing outside.

All this, so full swing practice can be legit in the offseason, during inclement weather or when there’s simply no time for a real round.

Sims have been filling the void for decades. Long before launch monitors and GPU-driven graphics engines rendered hyper-realistic fairways, a toddling Tiger Woods spent hours pounding balls into a makeshift net in his garage between meals in his highchair. Considering how those swing tuning sessions turned out, just imagine the caliber of talent that could be fostered if contemporary simulators leveled up their putting experience, a common pet peeve that causes golfers to use an outsized gimme zone to keep sim putting to the bare minimum.

This was the pain point Thomas Hackett, CEO and co-founder of Platform Golf and his partner Rory Flanagan, a former Hambric Sports agent who once represented Brooks Koepka, sought to solve. Platform Golf’s roots trace back to a prototype of an adjustable putting platform in 2014, but Hackett and Flanagan formalized the current iteration of the company a decade later with a vision to integrate full-swing simulation with true-to-life putting.

Hackett grew up playing on laggy, light-sensitive simulators in the late 1990s, when realistic putting was little more than an exercise in wishful thinking. The verisimilitude felt more like trying to time a jump to land on the flagpole at the end of a Super Mario Bros. level than actually holing a putt.

Putting Satisfaction

Scoring in real golf only happens in the moment a ball meets cup. On most simulators, that feeling still isn’t truly captured. Watching that ball roll on the screen after it’s struck feels too passive, lacking the suspense that builds in real golf as the ball you hit creeps toward the hole.

With Platform Golf’s simulator singularity solution, currently available as an add-on/integration for all TruGolf products through a partnership and capable of integrating with other systems, the experience gap between the full swing facsimile and putting is bridged. From ten feet and in (or more on larger units), golfers’ step on the putting surface portion of the simulator and can play the exact putt portrayed by the graphical interface displayed on the screen, break and all, toward a visual cup projected on the turf.

“The UI/UX, the visuals that you see now are phenomenal but still there is no way to qualify that made putt experience and that made putt feeling in golf of actually getting it in the hole,” Hackett explained.

“We like to call ourselves the platform enabling coaches, players and technology to achieve their true potential and in the process transform golf,” he added with Platform Golf’s technology seamlessly combining existing full-swing and putting systems to make the transition between the two feel natural and immersive.

The golf technology company raised $5 million last year, counting David Shapiro of KPS Capital, Keith Bank of KB Partners, Circle Rock Capital and Litquidity Ventures among its backers and the aforementioned newly named ambassador, Brad Faxon, is also part of the cap table.

Today Faxon is a top of the leaderboard coach who guides a coterie of famous pupils, including Rory McIlroy, in the fine arts of deciphering greens and making birdie drop. While he had seen earlier renditions of the technology over the years back when it was a standalone putting platform, he was drawn to the leap in realism Platform Golf’s combined full swing and putting platform brings to simulator play, when he saw one at Stephen Sweeney’s studio in Jupiter, Florida last year.

“It’s realistic. It’s what we see every time we play golf. You rarely have a putt that is dead straight and with Platform Golf you can make it break uphill right to left or downhill left to right,” he explains. “What I’ve always taught my students is there is always a window or a cone, it doesn’t have to be an exact perfectly small line to go to one spot in order to make putts and with Platform Golf you can practice trying to hit balls in firmly, hit them in softly or somewhere in between and I think that’s what creates incredible touch and more consistency when players are able to see that, feel that and hear that.”

“If you want to go down a deep path in putting—putting is emotional. There is certainly not one way to do this exactly correctly. There is athleticism, there is instinctiveness, all combined and when you are indoors those senses get deprived a little bit. But when Platform Golf can move when it does and it feels like it does outside, it brings back all the variables, the things you necessarily need to be great.”

As part of their deal, the flatstick whisperer will create exclusive instructional content to take his tour tested tutelage to simulator users via a video on demand subscription product called Academy, expected to launch in Q1 2026. The platform will feature both on-demand lessons and live virtual sessions with top coaches—including Faxon—following a Peloton-like model.

Targeting golf’s top-shelf coaches, that line of venerated instructors fans often spot hovering behind their players on the driving range during PGA Tour events, is Platform Golf’s strategy to scale sales. David Orr, Claude Harmon III, Stephen Sweeney, Erika Larkin, Darren May are among its roster.

“They are the people the public trusts when determining what type of training aids or tools they’re going use because they are really the experts,” Hackett explained.

Platform Golf sees D1 NCAA programs as a growth area for the product, their combined Trueslope full swing/putting platform combo, which starts at $28,000 and scales up from there. The largest size of the modular design can allow for real putts up to 25 feet.

Faxon agrees that the instructive space is where the product can really shine, believing the true breakthrough of Platform Golf lies in its ability to collapse the gap between what a student feels and what is actually happening.

He explains that the technology lets coaches show a player: “this is where you were aiming, this is where the ball started and this is why—or why not—the ball went in,” all in the service of fixing issues faster.

He envisions a future where simulators use AI to intuit a golfer’s own read before offering a correction based on green speed, percent of slope and how much a break is going to be.

“I would love to have technology that takes what the person about to hit the putt is thinking—and put that out to see if it’s correct,” Faxon said, rather than the computer displaying the correct path first.

That instinct traces back to his formative years as a pre-teen looping at Rhode Island Country Club on weekend mornings.

“The greens were wet and you could see the track the ball took on the dew line,” he recalled. “I always remember watching the ball roll and as it slowed down, how much it broke as gravity took over… I always kept that image to myself, every time I’d putt.”