SportsVisio

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Founders: Sam Corbitt, Brian French, Michael Seibert & Jason Syversan
Founding: 2021
Mission: See your game like never before
Employees: 15 & 70% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $6M raised
Investors: Hyperplane, Geek Ventures, Sapphire Sport, Sovereign Capital and other strategic investors
Key Customers: High Schools, Universities, Cerebro Sports & many more to come!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $25M+
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

SportsVisio is building AI video software to help you see your (hoop) game like never before. With just a smartphone trained on a court, this app can help players track all their stats from points to rebounds to assists to steals and more. 

Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?

Founded in 2021 by veteran New England entrepreneur Jason Syversan, SportsVisio is a follow up act. Jason grew up in Maine battling poverty before getting a full scholarship to University of Maine’s computer science program. It was his ticket.

After graduation, he worked in cybersecurity & defense tech for companies like Sanders (a Lockheed Martin company) before he was recruited to the Department of Defense’s DARPA agency. There, he managed a $100M portfolio of defense programs for a couple years.

After DARPA he co-founded Siege Technologies, a cybersecurity firm, bootstrapping the company and selling the business 9 years later to a private equity firm for an eight figure exit. Jason has what the people call “relevant startup experience”.

During his whirlwind of a career, life changed a lot. Jason & his wife were raising 6 kids at home and donated the majority of their post exit assets to a foundation they created. Then, he ran for NH State Senate in 2020. He lost to the incumbent by just 1,179 votes or 0.3% of the vote.

Jason was at a crossroads. He’d already accomplished so much in his career. Maybe it was time to become a full time investor & philanthropist through his foundation. Or, he could start another company to grow the impact he wanted to have on the world. Life (and sports) are games of inches and basketball players everywhere are the beneficiaries of that extremely slim margin of defeat.

Jason grew up playing basketball and coached his kids throughout their childhoods (his oldest is now 22) and saw an opportunity. There isn’t much technology on the court. And basketball turns out to be a venture scale market – $1.5B according to SportsVisio’s research. Youth sports are growing across the board with global leaders like soccer and emerging sports like lacrosse too.

At the consumer level, Jason hypothesized that a vertical SaaS / AI company would fit well. There’s a major opportunity to democratize access to technology and insights for smaller programs and players. Division One college programs are lighter on technology than you’d think too. Interns in basements across the nation are still combing through tape tallying points, rebounds & assists for their programs to make better decisions.

SportsVisio is building a technology and service to help disadvantaged schools & players get better insights out of their game. Jason put $500k of his own money in and teamed up with Boston based Hyperplane to raise the first round of funding for the startup in 2022. 

They aspire to help players get recruited, have fun with what they’re doing, and even receive highlight clips to put on social media. The company’s mantra is to do what people do better, faster, and cheaper. They’re building a technology and service for a fraction of the price and time leveraging AI. 

Stats are not just about points. The goal is to allow athletes to tally rebounds, assists, turnovers, and blocks to catalog better insights and give team players more recognition. The initial product launched in April of 2023 and you can use it via an app on your phone. Just download and sign up for a free trial on an iPhone or Android. 

Athletes or coaches can upload videos from Sony cameras or their smartphone, they don’t care how you record the video because the model is software centric. Their product does the work of transforming raw footage into recorded video, analytics & highlights. Jason adds that “people don’t fully understand what’s possible and how cheap it can be”. SportsVisio thinks they can support athletes for as little as $1 per player per game. This opens up opportunities to expand in many other ways. 

Today, there are a couple dozen high schools & colleges (Oxford University in fact) using the product with players as far away as Idaho & Spain. The team is in discussions with a large gym franchise with thousands of players and close to signing on an NBA player to help out as an advisor. Other early highlights include working with Cerebro Sports, a sports recruiting platform backed by Mark Cuban, with a roadmap to help make their player database more robust using SportsVisio’s technology and provide more consistent quantitative analysis for players. 

This year the company raised an additional $3M seed round with Sapphire Ventures, hoping to get the onboarding process fully automated by the end of Q1 2024. Next, they’ll be gearing up for their Series A by securing their IP and growing the research team. They hope to launch a second sport in 2024 and scale to 1000s of users and dozens of customers. Building a repeatable customer acquisition strategy is top of mind too.

In the future, they hope to explore a “player locker” concept where amateurs can digitally store their favorite plays, collect digital trophies, and track their metrics. All in an effort to expand the definition of success beyond “scoring points” to shift the balance of power to what matters as a team. SportsVisio has pledged to give 10% of its profits to charity and will continue to democratize access for players by scaling through a bottoms up approach.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the SportsVisio team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the key milestones to position the product for continued growth?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team and product offering?
  • What is the long term vision for the company?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about SportsVisio you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more athletes into the digital age. All players, coaches, parents, and fans applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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