Michael Jordan and Mark Cuban have invested in Sportradar, a fast-growing sports statistics business with its U.S. office in Minneapolis, and joined its advisory board, the company said Tuesday.
Revolution Growth, an investment firm co-founded by AOL founder Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, the owner of several Washington sports teams, led a $45 million funding round for the company and will join as strategic partners as the company looks at new ways to grow.
Leonsis, Michael Jordan, the owner of the Charlotte Hornets, and Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, will be valuable strategic partners, said Carsten Koerl, founder and CEO of Sportradar.
"Their intimate knowledge of the U.S. sports and media market will help us to develop cutting-edge real-time data products that will change how sports are consumed in the future," Koerl said.
Fueled by the rise of fantasy sports, sabermetrics, online sports gambling and even data-driven fraud detection, sports statistics has become an increasingly sophisticated business.
Sportradar US, which was founded as SportsData in 2010 in a room at the University of St. Thomas and acquired by Swiss stats giant Sportradar in 2013, is now the NFL's distributor of official real-time scores, player statistics and play-by-play data. The firm also organizes and distributes Next Gen Stats, the data flowing from the NFL's technology that uses chips in shoulder pads to track a new category of precise statistics.
That deal, announced in April, came on the heels of a similar partnership Sportradar US made with NASCAR in February.
The company was started by Rob Phythian, who co-founded Fantasy Football Weekly and the website FanBall, and Dave Abbott, the founding chief technology officer of Internet Broadcasting Systems, a company that built websites for TV stations. Together, the duo figured they could do a better job collecting and distributing sports data. They attracted local angel investors to get going.
Sports stats companies get their data by two methods. They can partner with a league or association to collect and distribute official numbers from statkeepers at the site of the competition, or they must watch the competition on television or online and keep track of stats themselves.
Sportradar US started by paying college students to watch sporting events and enter stats meticulously into the company's database. Today, from an office in downtown Minneapolis, it continues to employ many part-time statkeepers. Every night, a room with 140 stations of TV monitors and computer screens fills up as the puck drops or the first pitch is thrown at contests all over the country.
The system of feeds built by Abbott and the firm's developers allows the firm to sell the stats to customers who need the data. In the early days, the customers were fantasy sports leagues. Later, Google became a customer after executives were impressed by the quality of Abbott's software. Then, Facebook and Twitter became customers. Now NBC, IBM and Turner Sports are customers.
Abbott and Phythian retained an equity stake in the firm when it was acquired by Sportradar. The company has 80 full-time employees and 130 part-time workers in Minneapolis.
Adam Belz • 612-673-4405 Twitter: @adambelz
