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If you follow sports even a little, you know that the impact of analytics and data has changed the way sports work. As teams build larger and larger analytics departments, and data becomes linked to on-field and off-field decision making, how do teams deal with the increasing volume of data?
Zelus Analytics, a company started by a former baseball analytics executive, wants to help teams across sports gather myriads of data and put it to work.
Today, the company announced a $3.6 million investment, which includes money from existing investor RedBird Capital, as well as participation from GameTime Capital, TeamWorthy Ventures, 35V and former Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane, who was hired in 2003. Bringing about was mentioned in Michael Lewis’s book. Analysis of Baseball, “Moneyball.”
Zelus works with analytics groups across a variety of sports to help them connect the various data sources these teams need to create models with the goal of making better decisions, whether it’s player acquisition, on-field decision making or There may be many factors. In creating and running sports franchises.
Company co-founder and CEO Doug Fearing knows where he speaks from when it comes to sports analysis. His background includes stints as senior advisor in baseball research and development for the Tampa Bay Rays and director of research and development for the Los Angeles Dodgers, two MLB franchises known for their intensive use of analytics.
“We basically help teams use their data to win more games,” Fearing told TechCrunch. This involves projecting and improving player and team performance.
“And it’s through using all the complex proprietary data sources that teams have access to to create models that contextualize historical performance, that project future performance that inform strategic decision-making around player acquisitions. Helps in … and then also gets involved in tactical and in-game decisions like making who is the best matchup,” he said.
He says what sets his company apart from others in the field is that they don’t care where the data is coming from. It can pull everything together. He says, “We have a robust data engineering pipeline that we’ve set up across all sports that really shares a lot of common infrastructure across all sports that allows us to ingest those sources and process them on a daily basis. allows for.”
Currently, the company is making money by working with teams in six major sports, including baseball, basketball, hockey, football, cricket and soccer. With the investment, they plan to start thinking about how to expand that approach to areas like college sports, e-sports and even bring their platform directly to consumers like individual athletes. Should be made available.
“I think there’s a general feeling from our investors that the value of the IP that we’ve developed at a professional level is incredibly high, and they would really like us to accelerate in terms of monetizing that IP in these other spaces.” “Move on,” she said.
“We have been quite conservative in that most of our development efforts have been on the Pro product. “This growth is really allowing us to investigate these other opportunities.”
