New technology from startup ventures is transforming the global sports industry. This Startup Series has introduced over 300 startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience by allowing Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story and pitch their idea. Feel free to submit your startup’s answers to the below questions or contact us if you know of a startup that should be considered for inclusion in this series. This particular startup is part of the Hype Foundation.
Company name: SciSports
Founder(s): Giels Brouwer, Anatoliy Babic
Headquarters: Enschede, The Netherlands
1. What is your elevator pitch?
SciSports transforms even the most simple statistics into wisdom. Our proven technology has outplayed the bookmakers with its detailed algorithms and is able to surprise and convince even the brightest minds in science and football. With our new product BallJames, we created a system that makes it possible to capture the reality of what happens on a pitch and transform it, in real-time, into 3D data of the players and the ball. BallJames will revolutionize not only football but also enhance real-life sports into a video-game-like experience for billions of fans.
BallJames will create a paradigm shift in sports performance, coaching, refereeing, multiscreen media experiences and sports betting.
2. Problem & Solution
Data is inaccurate, wisdom is scarce. Although data has surely taken on an important role in professional sports, there is still a lot of ground to be gained. Currently football data is predominantly recorded manually making it inaccurate and incomplete.For instance, most often than not there are hardly any data feeds related to the ball. Despite these shortcomings SciSports has time and again proven to the market that they can even transform current data into wisdom.The SciSkill index ranks all professional football players worldwide, which provides very valuable information to football clubs and scouts. Furthermore, these algorithms can be implemented relatively easy for other team sports. In the meantime, we are working on creating the best technology to solve the inaccuracy and incompleteness of data: BallJames. In the near future, we would be in a position to deliver the best in class data and wisdom for any (team) sport as well.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
Our primary target clients would be the scouts, clubs, managers and federations involved in the football industry. Additionally, the statistical insights generated by our system would be of value for the broadcast media industry, stadium owners, regulatory bodies and the sport betting industry as well. BallJames i.e. our real-time object tracking system is turning out to be so universal that we can easily sidestep to other sports, we plan to do so during 2017.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
For larger clients that are technically advance we offer access to our wisdom in the form of a data feed based on a subscription fee. The data feed is priced based on tiers, the parameters in the feed can range from player skill index to match result predictions. For clients that require additional assistance our in-house consultants provide advice in the form of reports which are used to evaluate player they are interested in. The pricing of these reports depends on the individual use cases provided by our clients.
5. Management Team – with titles
Giels Brouwer – CEO
Gerrit Jan van Ahee – CTO
Hans d’Hollosy – CCO