January 3rd, 2022
Gemini Sports Analytics is a startup that helps sports teams make data-driven decisions on athlete acquisition, development, and management using artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics. The company recently raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by leAD Sports & Tech Partners, an Orlando-based joint venture between the family office of Adidas’ founder and Tavistock.
"We help sports teams win more games by using their athlete data to make better, faster decisions on how they acquire, develop and manage their athletes,” said Jake Schuster, the founder and CEO of Gemini Sports Analytics.
The startup is releasing the beta version of its web application with its first customer, an Italian soccer team, and has built commercial relationships with an NFL team and an NBA team. In the next three to six months, the company's focus will be on "hitting a home run with early partners who co-create with us and ensure that we’re doing a good job,” said Schuster.
Gemini Sports Analytics was founded by a team with experience in professional sports, including senior software developers Chandler Evans and Nate Verlin, who previously worked for the Houston Astros. The company's AI-powered technology allows teams to access data faster and deploy new data models in just hours.
"What’s important for us in the next three to six months is not stacking up revenue, it’s hitting a home run with early partners who co-create with us and ensure that we’re doing a good job,” said Schuster. "This is an industry very, very jaded from poor software that over promises and under delivers, so we’re pretty dedicated to doing the opposite.”
Gemini Sports Analytics has already made a strong impression on its early partners. Duncan French, the VP of performance at the UFC Performance Institute, said the startup "understands the daily workflow and reality of applied sport science in the elite environment."
"Having aggregated a pretty significant amount of information and data, having built out a pretty decent data architecture to this point, the next iteration of that development was into our ability to harness the power of the data in a more automated fashion,” said French. "One of the things that we have is a capacity issue. We don't have data scientists on our team, right? So it's either our own staff, or it doesn't get done.”
it is not clear which particular AI or machine learning techniques are being utilized. It is possible that Gemini Sports Analytics is using a range of techniques, such as decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, neural networks, or a combination of these and other methods, depending on the specific needs and characteristics of the data being analyzed.
With its new funding, Gemini Sports Analytics plans to bring on more staff and advisors to continue refining its product. The company aims to help sports teams make better use of their data to improve performance and achieve success on the field.