Kitman Labs, the Dublin-based sports technology and analytics company setting a new industry standard for how elite sports organizations use data and operate, just announced the close of a €45 million investment round led by Guggenheim Investments (on behalf of certain of its managed accounts), a global asset investment and advisory firm with more than $259 billion in assets under management. The latest investment brings Kitman Labs’ total outside funding to €70 million.
Elite sports leagues and teams are collecting record amounts of player data from wearables, tracking systems, and legacy point solutions often used by a single department. On average, 2.5 million data points per athlete will be gathered this year. By 2025, that number is expected to increase to 230 million data points per athlete – a staggering increase of over 9,000%. With this influx, organizations around the globe are currently faced with the challenge of finding meaningful insights in this data that can be shared by the entire organization. Kitman Labs has created an operating system for sport that enables organizations to consolidate and transform data from point solutions into actionable, team-specific insights with advanced analytics that guide collaborative decisions about talent strategies, performance, health and safety, and youth development.
Stephen Smith, the founder and CEO of Kitman Labs stated: “We are empowering teams to move quickly into the new paradigm for sports performance and talent strategy, characterized by bringing together data, people and processes. Our fully-scalable operating system for sport bridges the gap between legacy software, trackers and wearables, consolidating them into one centralized platform that creates real-time insights that improve performance on and off the field. “With the support of Guggenheim Investments, we can scale the company faster to create the industry standard solution and accelerate ongoing innovation to stay ahead of the rapidly changing market requirements in sport.
Kitman Labs will leverage the new capital in three specific ways:
- Investment in data science and development of its platform to help teams consolidate more data from across their organization into a single platform, improve and automate workflows for all departments in a sports team, and turn data into powerful intelligence.
- Growth of the global team to accelerate product development and continue the growth of the domain experts that understand the unique challenges of a team environment and help to tailor their platform and insight based on each team’s style of play, system and goals. Following a year of 56% growth in global headcount, grow its current team of 125 by 100 people, an 80% increase in the size of the company.
- Furthering its industry-leading research effort to help sports, medical and technology professionals better understand the power of data in sport.
In the last two years, Kitman Labs acquired The Sports Office and Presagia Sports, creating the industry’s largest dataset of talent, performance, and medical data for all stages of the athlete lifecycle. Kitman Labs plans to expand its focus beyond sports in 2022 to include the military and government service category, given the myriad parallels in human performance requirements.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com
November 5, 2021 at 08:03AM by contact@bcurdy.com, Khareem Sudlow
