Sloan Sports Analytics Conference - Startup Competition and Trade Show
Nine startups that use analytics to empower athletes, coaches, fans, and sports business professionals
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This year the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was back to an in person event, and it felt great to have a true conference experience. For those who don't know, this event is the largest student run conference in the world. In it's 16th consecutive year, the conference brings together leading figures in sports analytics, business, and technology to discuss the most important issues in sports.
There was a stellar lineup of amazing speakers and panelists this year, including Sue Bird, Malcolm Gladwell, Nate Silver, and Renie Anderson. I went to some great panels, including an awesome talk moderated by Pablo Torre on maximizing competitive meaning in professional athletics. But as always my favorite event was the startup competition, where passionate entrepreneurs showcased their innovations in the fields of sports-related technologies, products, and services.
A special thank you to Microsoft for Startups for sponsoring this event and to the incredibly thoughtful judges. Below are the startups that pitched. Starting with the winners and in no particular order following, here are nine startups innovating in sports.
Swoopt
In 1st place, and winning $5,000 in Microsoft Azure credits, was Swoopt. Swoopt is the Kayak for live events, making it easier for fans to purchase tickets for games and other live events.
Buying tickets to games is hard. There's a number of competing ticket marketplaces that all feel exactly the same and have tons of hidden fees. For me, by the time I get my tickets I usually have eight different chrome tabs open and still don't feel like I got the best deal. Swoopt is changing all of that. They're a search engine aggregator for live event tickets, that compares prices across platforms so you don't have to.
How does it work? Swoopt is a search engine, not a ticket marketplace. Swoopt ingests direct API inventory feeds from the most popular ticket marketplaces and distills the data into a simple, easy to use web page. Within the Swoopt platform, users can quickly see the lowest price offered for a given event, and gain further piece of mind by clicking 'compare' to view what that ticket is going for elsewhere on the open market.
The founding team is super impressive and demonstrated their knowledge about the space. The CEO, Brandon Muto, is a second time entrepreneur and his partner Skyler has a strong background in the sports entertainment industry. The live events market is poised for a strong recovery post Covid. As the only price comparison tool for live events, Swoopt seems well positioned for some exciting growth!
Reaction Technologies
In 2nd place (and winning an Xbox) was Reaction Technologies. This mission driven startup was founded to prevent tragic injuries in collision sports.
Growing up in Texas, the founding team have had a lifelong personal connection with the game of football. However, they were pained by the number of tragedies that occurred due to spine, neck, and head injuries sustained from football so they decided to do something about it. Their patent approved technology helps teach proper technique by measuring head-spine-torso alignment and other metrics at point of contact. This reinforces the proper "heads up" tackling technique in an easy and repeatable manner to create muscle memory.
The current product is rooted in the game of football, however the team sees potential applications in other collision sports like basketball, soccer, rugby, and lacrosse. The team is currently in the process of beta testing the product and anticipate a launch date next summer. I spoke with the CEO Brandon Martin and his brother Jalen after the event, and was energized by their passion for this mission. I'm excited to see this technology used with athletes at all levels to help promote safety in the sports we love.
Hedge Pay
In 3rd Place (and also winning an Xbox) was Hedge Pay. Hedge Pay is building Acorn for sports gambling. They deposit the digital spare change from your everyday purchases into your favorite sports gambling platform.
Hedge Pay is an embedded FinTech solution offering an API that integrates directly with the cashier window at major sportsbooks. It works much like other ‘round up’ offerings. With Hedge Pay, your $2.70 cup of coffee is rounded up to $3.00. But that remaining 30 cents is deposited into your favorite sports book so you can bet on your favorite team, rather than being deposited into an investment account like with Acorn.
What’s most exciting about this startup is the value they create for sportsbooks. There were a number of panels at this year’s conference on sports gambling, and a major theme from sports betting companies was the need for growth through retention. Loyalty in this market is hard, especially when the occasional bettor can move to a new platform once their account balance reaches zero. The Hedge Pay solution not only lowers CAC for sportsbooks with their channel, it also increases customer LTV by continuously depositing small amounts to keep customers coming back. The best part is that Hedge Pay monetizes by charging a 1% fee to the sportsbooks, meaning there’s no additional fees to the sports bettors.
BodhiSport
Up next, two former football players founded BodhiSport to better predict athletic talent. They're using digital cognition tests that help measure sport and position level cognitive agility.
We all know the importance of decision making and cognitive ability, especially at positions like quarterback. Cognition as a differentiator is a major reason why players like Tom Brady can compete for so many years. Sadly, our ability to measure this hasn’t gotten much better over the years. The Wonderlic test has been around since 1936, and depending on who you ask it’s not always regarded very highly…
BodhiSport is on a mission to better measure the way cognition creates competitive edge. They currently have twenty five tests ranging from 4-12 minutes in length. I had a great chat with BodhiSport president Ben Barnett after the event, and even signed up for a demo to see how my cognitive skills stack up.
DSA Laboratories
DSA Laboratories is on a mission to replace the coaches clipboard. Starting with soccer, they’re creating tools that digitize information tracking and make decision making easier.
Their software helps players, coaches, and managers by allow them to gain data driven insights, make actionable decisions, and ultimately win more games. Their software allows coaches to set lineups, track practice and game data, and analyze results using a high powered predictive engine.
True to the theme of this year’s conference, DSA Labs is helping teams ‘seize the data.’ As sports management continues to become more data driven, DSA labs is helping soccer teams do so in a more efficient and actionable manner.
FinMo Card Company
FinMo Card Company provides technology services and custom solutions to the professional grading companies that authenticate and grade sports cards.
Sports card collecting is not just a hobby, it’s a massive industry that saw huge growth during the pandemic. FinMo Card Company expects the trading card market to grow from $14B to $98B by 2027. In order to value cards, collectors typically have their best cards authenticated and scored by an independent grading company, like Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) or Certified Sports Guaranty (CSG). Three of these companies control 98% of the market, but because of the huge boom in the industry there is currently a major backlog for card grading and authentication. According to FinMo, it can take up to 18 months to receive your card back after sending it off to the grading company for authentication.
FinMo uses their machine learning technology to streamline the grading and authentication process for grading companies. They use high resolution cameras and a patented, autonomous grading device to collect data from each card, quantify the condition, and assign a grade. They’re also able to highlight defects to both graders and customers. Matt Hernandez gave a great pitch. I spoke with him after the event and he’s a card collector himself who is super passionate about improving this space.
Ludis Analytics
Ludis Analytics is an end-to-end data science platform accelerating analytics across organizations. They’re on a mission to make all data easy to use, by providing a streamlined environment for managing data science and analytics.
Ludis offers three key benefits. First, it allows you to manage all your data in one place improving institutional memory. Second, it offers clean and structured data that saves analysts the pain of cleaning, prepping, and ingesting data. Finally, it provides a no-code experience for executives and decision makers to read and analyze key reports.
Ludis is helping sports teams deliver on their data and analytics objectives. Sports organizations like Cricket New South Whales have already leveraged Ludis to better manage, prepare, share, and make decisions with their data.
Novig
Novig is a peer-to-peer sports betting exchange and the first platform to offer truly commission-free bets.
According to the Novig team, sportsbooks take an average of 8% on winnings, meaning betters need a ~53% break even win percentage to be profitable. Novig disintermediates traditional sportsbooks by creating a public exchange for players to bet directly against one another, without fees.
Novig sees traditional sportsbooks as exploitive and unnecessary, and aims to make sports betting more engaging, social, and profitable by replacing the middle man with a fair and transparent exchange.
Novig just raised their initial funding through a pre-seed round with investors including Lux Capital and Innospark Ventures. They’re actively hiring engineers to further build their product and grow the Novig offering.
ReSpo Vision
Last but not least is ReSpo Vision which is unlocking the true potential of sports data. They use optical 3D tracking from a single camera to track in game movements of soccer players and teams.
The ReSpo Vision technology captures detailed 3D tracking data of all players and the ball in real-time from any broadcast TV feed. Their computer vision and machine learning algorithms can watch any soccer game recorded by a single TV camera and harvest detailed 3D tracking data of 20+ body parts of all players and the ball, 60 times per second.
The data they collect is provided to clubs, federations, bookmakers, and media to give them an unmatched depth of knowledge. Alternative data has become super important to each of these types of organizations, and ReSpo Vision is excited to provide a unique data advantage.
I hope you enjoyed reading about each of these startups! If you want more of these recaps directly to your inbox, subscribe below. I’m currently working on a recap of the awesome startups from this weekend’s MIT Sloan Asia Business Conference, so keep a look out for that in the coming days!