Stadia Ventures announced four new companies to be a part of its spring sports business accelerator program. The four companies were selected from a pool of applicants from more than twenty countries.
“Every 6 months, we have the challenge of deciding what sports startups we want to work with out of the hundreds that we see apply. We’re incredibly excited by these 4 companies we now have the privilege of working with over the course of the program and beyond,” says Tim Hayden, co-founder and Managing Director at Stadia Ventures in a press release. “We’re expecting big things from them in the months and years to come!”
Here are the companies:
FocusMotion (Santa Monica, CA) — FocusMotion builds connected, data-driven orthopedic recovery solutions to automatically assess and monitor pre-op and post-op patients through their proprietary machine learning algorithms and sensor arrays. It is designed with physical therapy and labor industries in mind.
GamerzArena (Chicago, IL) — GamerzArena provides daily video game contests where users compete for cash prizes in a fully integrated and seamless social experience. It is a community-based tournament organizer for gaming that focuses on the casual gamer and is similar in many ways to established esports tournament organizer BattleFly. The company will also have to compete with some games in-house tournament mode, like Rocket League’s which came out of beta today.
IdealSeat (Seattle, WA) — IdealSeat is a fan intelligence, big data company that aims to help fans make more informed ticket purchasing decisions while increasing sales conversions for the ticket providers.
It is similar to other seating apps like SeatGeek but adds in its own algorithms to create a more curated experience and raise the value of an individual ticket in the stadium. Especially for baseball, IdealSeat can tell a ticket buyer where they are most likely to catch a foul ball or home run.
Spalk (Auckland, New Zealand & New York City, NY) — Spalk wants to empower influencers, athletes and fans to commentate live TV from anywhere through their platform that integrates with streams from major sports properties. As we see more traditional broadcasts of sporting events offer other audio tracks in addition to the traditional play-by-play and color duo, Spalk brings the opportunity of commentating live sports to the fans themselves. This all goes in to curating the live sports experience for the individual fan, something Turner did during March Madness with channels dedicated to teamcasts for all Final Four teams in addition to the national broadcast.
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SportTechie Takeaway:
This is the sixth cohort for Stadia Ventures and they have now invested in 25 companies. Past companies chosen for the accelerator include Reely, who combine AI and broadcast, and VNTANA, who created an interactive Clayton Kershaw hologram at Dodgers’ games. Stadia has had one of their portfolio companies be acquired so far: Winning Identity, a golf software startup, was acquired by Blast Motion in April 2016.
Stadia’s approach to their program focuses on providing their portfolio companies value through investments up to $100,000, dedicated mentorship and connections to their network, which is centered is St. Louis but has grown in the U.S. and internationally recently.