SportsVisio, the Manchester-based firm that specializes in sports artificial intelligence (AI) technology, recently closed a $3.1 million seed round to scale its Computer Vision AI technology to automate statistics, analytics and video highlights for sports, starting with basketball.
“Athletes, coaches and fans at all levels want insights about player and team performance, along with easily shareable content on social media,” says SportsVisio Founder and CEO Jason Syversen. (Pictured Left, Courtesy of SportsVisio)
He says schools and leagues are saddled with manually tracking stats for games and hiring people to record video, which can get costly, or it is done by volunteers with a high error rate. Syversen says his technology can do the same and more for a third of the price (about $350 per team for a season).
SportsVisio (Sportsvisio.com) has about 20 employees and is hiring for a variety of positions, including UI/UX product designers, full stack developers, and AI and machine learning.
Syversen is a successful entrepreneur, having sold Siege Technologies, a cybersecurity R&D company, in 2016, making enough to retire in his early 40s. In his early retirement, Syversen formed a foundation to donate to charity and had an unsuccessful run for state Senate.
Syversen is driven, having grown up in poverty in rural Maine and watching his dad struggle with mill jobs and being underemployed or unemployed. The family was even homeless for a summer, he says. He worked hard for a better life. “I got a free ride for college and came to New Hampshire and worked for BAE,” Syversen says of the time before launching his
first company.
He was inspired to launch SportsVisio by his own experience playing in a men’s basketball league. “My wife and kids asked how I did, and I said, ‘I don’t know,’” Syversen says. While SportsVisio is starting with basketball, Syversen says he plans to expand the technology to other sports. “I have a clear path to $50 [million] to $100 million in revenue,” he says.