Krossover, a sports video analytics company, just announced that they have received $20 million in Series B financing. The company which officially launched in 2010, will use this second round of investments to continue to develop their video technology and analytics platforms.
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The New York City-Based company, who we covered here two years ago, specializes in providing high-level and sophisticated video analytics for sports teams, at all levels. Their goal is to help coaches and players improve through their easy to use game film breakdowns and statics.
Their Series B financing comes in large part from RSE Ventures, a sports and entertainment VC firm co-owned by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross. Other support came from Dan Gilbert, Cleveland Cavaliers owner who is a part of Rock Ventures, as well as Lyrical Partners and Admiral Capital Group (a group which Basketball Hall of Famer David Robinson is a part of).
Krossover’s founder, Vasu Kulkarni, played JV basketball at University of Pennsylvania and that is where he conceived of the idea to analyze game film.
The company does analysis for a multitude of sports including basketball, football, volleyball and lacrosse. Krossover’s analytics allows players and coaches to review their games in a multitude of ways. The film is broken down play-by-play into individual video clips, as well as built in advanced player and team statics.
To date, the company has analyzed almost 50 million possessions from over 350,000 games. And they now claim to have the world’s largest database of searchable game film. For a team to get involved with Krossover the process is relatively simple. With packages starting at $400, a team sends them their game(s) film. It is then analyzed, broken down and sent back to the team within roughly 24-hours. Their computing is all cloud based, therefore teams and coaches are able to search and watch the film from any device, at anytime.
With Krossover, coaches and players are able to filter and search all of the film in great detail, to pinpoint specifics in order to improve. The games are spliced into possession-by-possession videos, that are broken down into searchable clips. For basketball there are interactive shot charts, second chance points, defensive efficiencies and much more. For football they provide details about red zone plays, tackles for a loss and 3rd down stops, to name a few.
Krossover’s goal is to allow coaches to spend less time breaking down and editing their team’s film. Their cloud-based service also allows team and conferences to share this video with each other. Although their service is cutting edge and provides teams and players with an array of advanced data and film, in an extremely user friendly way, they still break down the video in a tried and true method. They use people.
Their leadership team consists of seven members, and they currently employee 80 people full time, but much of the basic video breakdown is outsourced. As Kulkarni told Sports Illustrated last year, people are still the best option for them because “identifying the players is probably the hardest thing when you have players entering or leaving the field of vision. ”
Krossover uses a network of roughly 2,000 active users, many of which are college students in the United States and around the world, who are paid around $20 per game. A game film is sent to a user, its broken down in roughly two hours, then sent through quality assurance analytics and then lastly it is sent to another user for final review.
They have worked with 10,000 sports teams in more than 20 countries, including a few very notable ones such as the Cleveland Cavaliers and the University of Kentucky. However, they mostly work with less well known college and high school teams.
With their new funding, Krossover is looking to provide their cutting edge sports analytics, video and data management tools to even more teams, coaches and players that are looking to both improve and save time.