SportsData snares data services deal with NASCAR

SportsData, a Minneapolis firm that collects and sells sports statistics, on Monday announced a new deal to handle real-time race data for NASCAR.

The company will tap into NASCAR's system of sensors and become the motor-sports governing body's official stats provider.

"We get the data directly from each of the tracks, and then we package it up in a way that's easier to consume, and sell it as official NASCAR data," said Dave Abbott, founder and chief operating officer of SportsData.

SportsData, which has 55 full-time employees and about 100 part-time workers, is in the Fifth Street Towers in downtown Minneapolis. The business got its start by hiring people to watch games on television, score them and then use software to repackage the data and sell it to fantasy sports leagues.

The company's clients also include Google, Bleacher Report, Facebook and the Pac-12 Conference. The firm was acquired in 2013 by Sportradar, a Switzerland-based supplier of real-time sports solutions.

Abbott said the company is hiring developers and data entry workers to score games. The firm relies on the fact that a broadcast sports event's stats become public domain. The firm's data entry analysts cover more than 40 sports, more than 800 leagues and more than 200,000 sports events each year.

With the NASCAR deal, however, the company will tap directly into the racing body's data and use its technology to repackage it.