Keemotion, the company behind a new automated video technology for sports competitions, announced a $3.6 million Series A funding round Wednesday that includes investment from former NBA commissioner David Stern.
Keemotion CEO Milton Lee told SportTechie that the company will use this latest round to bolster its research and development team as it begins to expand into new sports beyond the five — basketball, ice hockey (it has an official partnership with the Buffalo Sabres), volleyball, handball and futsal — it’s in today.
Interestingly with this cash influx, Keemotion is also beginning to set its sights on potentially expanding beyond sports, with Lee saying the idea is to “eventually get into all sports and into non-sports related” industries.
Keemotion is in early-stage conversations with a number of technology companies to figure out how its technology might potentially be used more broadly in film production, sports and consumer technology, or how technology such as deep learning and artificial intelligence might help to improve its product and accelerate the development of its automated technologies.
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“From a 10,000-foot view, that would speed up the evolution of our technology,” Lee said. “AI would replace a lot of computer programmers who are day-to-day constantly coding and recalibrating. Once you leave that to machine learning, it opens up this vast expanse of potential outcomes of what we’re going to be able to do with our technology.”
The Series A was led by Elysian Park Ventures in association with Guggenheim Baseball Management and the Los Angeles Dodgers, R/GA Ventures in association with Interpublic Group, GO4IT Investments from Brazil, Pincus Capital Management, and Stern. Keemotion was one of the companies chosen for the LA Dodgers Sports Accelerator program in 2016.
Stern is noteworthy not only because he’s considered a thought leader in sports, but also because he has a unique understanding of sports content and production, having been in the industry for so many years. Earlier this year, Stern also invested in the amateur sports broadcasting app SportsCastr.Live.
“He has lived through the evolution of the transformational value of content,” Lee said. “He of anyone — outside of a John Skipper or Roger Goodell, or any of the other contemporaries — understands both the value of content and the pressure points of producing that content.”
Stern has also been a mentor to Lee for some time — even though he seemingly forgot the name of Keemotion while on a panel at Hashtag Sports in June — and he’s an influential figure in the industry who’s not afraid to extend that influence when needed or offer criticism when he sees fit, Lee said.
In a prepared statement, Stern said Keemotion’s autonomous production technology has the potential to “disrupt the way all live events are produced. And that’s not limited to sports.”
In a Forbes podcast last month, Stern called Keemotion the “Tesla for sports broadcasting” because of its ability to automate production. He talked about how Keemotion could be installed in a high school or university gym or arena, and how all events could then be streamed no matter what’s taking place there, giving people access to events from their mobile devices.
Other Keemotion investors include David Blitzer, co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Devils, Jason Levien, managing owner of DC United, Irina Pavlova former president of Onexim Sports and Entertainment (Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov’ holding company for U.S. investments that Lee once worked for) and NBA veteran Mike Dunleavy Jr.
Further into the future, Lee imagines that Keemotion will not only expand beyond sports, but expand, perhaps, into consumer technology as well. He believes Keemotion’s automated technology might one day do for personal filming as what the front-facing camera did for selfies.
“The selfie is ubiquitous now even though it’s relatively new. As more tech becomes more accessible, people are going to want to see more of themselves, and that definitely includes the video of themselves doing who knows what,” Lee said. “Anything you can imagine filming, we’re imagining there’s a marketplace for that. I think it’s going to morph into things we never thought of.”