Skip to main content

StatMuse Picks Up $10M For Its AI-Based, Graphic Search Engine For Sports Statistics


The business of sport revolves around stats — from those who use them to improve performance, through to those who look at them for fun, or for more financial ends. Now a startup that helps make it easier for regular people to dig into and visualise sports stats has picked up some funding to grow. StatMuse, a startup out of San Francisco that currently lets you search for basketball facts and statistics through ordinary “natural” language requests, has picked up a $10 million round of funding.
The Series A comes from the Walt Disney Company and TechStars (StatMuse was in a 2015 cohort in the Disney/TechStars Accelerator), along with Allen & Company, Greycroft Partners, Promus Ventures, Haas Portman, Deep Fork Capital, and Bee Partners. The round also included some notable names from the sports world: former NBA commissioner David Stern and United Talent Agency also chipped in.
The Disney involvement is strategic: after launching its public beta in the autumn of 2015, StatMuse signed a content deal with Disney-owned ESPN to provide statistical content during the 2015-16 NBA season.
StatMuse — which continues to be in beta — says it will use the funding to extend its search engine into other sports beyond basketball.
The idea behind StatMuse is not an uncommon one: there are very powerful search algorithms in the market today, but many of the most advanced to call up statistics and other analytics have been created in language more suited for data scientists, making them inaccessible to regular Joes.
At the same time, there have been a number of innovations around big data, machine learning and natural language processing that are giving more analytics power to non-technical users, be they marketers or others in the business who could benefit from directly making their own analytical queries.
StatMuse’s founders Eli Dawson (CEO) and Adam Elmore (CTO) — childhood friends who co-captained their high school basketball team — saw that there was an opportunity to apply that principle to the world of sports statistics to tap into the general appetite not only to look up facts, but to view them in a graphic, engaging way.
statmuse
“We built a product for fellow sports fans interested in statistics and visual media. StatMuse is our vision for a highly engaging media platform that fuels sports discussion anywhere in the world,” Dawson said in a statement.
Today you can go on to StatMuse’s site to look up all kinds of basketball stats, where the range of queries is very open-ended. I looked up “players named Larry,” who I could then order by their various other stats like points scored or minutes played.
You can then share the information to Facebook or Twitter, or to a StatMuse-only social network: you can also follow and be followed by people on the site itself, laying the groundwork for a potential community of other sports nerds using whatever other features StatMuse launches next.
The service reminds me a bit of others like Graphiq, which also lets you look up trends and information and then visualise it. But while Graphiq today seems mainly interested in a B2B play, courting publishers as users (disclaimer: TC/AOL are among them), StatMuse is potentially developing both the B2B (per its deal with Disney/ESPN) and and consumer angle, focusing specifically on the opportunity to provide better stats for sports.
Today, there isn’t really much of a narrative to be gleaned from the stats apart from what you see when your search results have been returned to you, but the longer term idea seems to develop products that will give those stats even more context — or at least work with partners, like ESPN, that will provide that context alongside the bare numbers.
“Sports is, by itself, the international language, but StatMuse has taken a giant leap forward, transforming sports statistics into meaningful, storytelling prose,” said David Stern in a statement.
As a pure content play, it’s unsurprising to see Disney taking an interest in the startup.
Disney is an old media company built around TV and movies, but it is fully 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Shatterproof screens to protect smartphones

Polymer scientists at the University of Akron in Ohio have developed a transparent electrode that could change the face of smartphones, literally, by making their displays shatterproof. In a recently published paper, researchers show how a transparent layer of nanowire-based electrodes on a polymer surface could be extraordinarily tough and flexible, withstanding repeated scotch tape peeling and bending tests. This could revolutionise and replace conventional touchscreens, according to Yu Zhu, UA assistant professor of polymer science. Currently used coatings made of indium tin oxide (ITO) are more brittle, most likely to shatter, and increasingly costly to manufacture. “These two pronounced factors drive the need to substitute ITO with a cost-effective and flexible conductive transparent film,” Zhu says, adding that the new film provides the same degree of transparency as ITO, yet offers greater conductivity. The novel film retains its shape and functionality after tests i...

Get 56GB of free cloud storage in one folder!

Bring Your Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, & OneDrive All Together In One Folder With odrive! Dropbox gives you up to 16GB free.  Google Drive & Gmail give you 15GB. OneDrive gives you 15GB. Box gives you 10GB. odrive brings all your cloud storage apps together in one folder right on your desktop. Just link your Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, Box, and OneDrive accounts to odrive and instantly get all your files scattered everywhere in one place! You can even link multiple accounts from each app to get even more! 1. Install odrive. DOWNLOAD It's free! And available for Windows & Mac :) 3.Get all your stuff! 2. Link all your cloud storage accounts. Note:  This gives odrive permission to download your files for you. odrive doesn't store anything, we promise! OXYGEN CLOUD, INC., 1600 SEAPORT BLVD, REDWOOD CITY, CA, 94063, UNITED  ...

So, when will your device actually get Android Oreo?

Google officially just took the wraps off of Android Oreo, but there are still some questions left to be answered — most notably, precisely when each device will be getting the latest version of the mobile operating system. Due to Android’s openness and a variety of different factors on the manufacturing side, it’s not an easy question to answer, but we’ll break it down best we can. First the good news: If your device was enrolled in the Android Beta Program, you’ll be getting your hands on the final version of the software “soon,” according to Google. Exactly what that means remains to be seen, but rest assured that you’ll be one of of the first people outside of Google to take advantage of picture-in-picture, notification dots and the like. No big surprise, Google handsets will be the first non-beta phones to get the update. The Pixel, Nexus 5X and 6P are at the top of the list, alongside Pixel C tablet and ASUS’s Nexus Player set-top box, which will be receiving the upgrade i...

The Withings Go Is A Cheap Little Activity Tracker

Withings  has one more thing up its sleeve, a new activity tracker. This isn’t a new version of the  Pulse  or Activité. This is a brand new activity tracker. And the best part is that it only costs $69. The Withings Go uses an always-on E Ink display like the one on your Kindle or original Pebble. It’s very power efficient but it’s also a black and white display. But the good thing about this kind of display is that the Withings Go uses a button cell battery and the battery lasts 8 months. This new device tracks your steps, distance, running activity and swimming activity. You can also use it to track your sleep cycles. Compared to other entry-level activity trackers, you can do quite a lot. You don’t have to switch between activities — the device switches automatically. And of course, you can get your data in the Withings Health Mate app on iOS and Android. The Withings Go will be available in Q1 2016. Now the question is whether people want ...

Where does Blue Apron go after Amazon wraps up its Whole Foods deal?

Last week, Amazon said that its massive $13.7 billion deal to acquire Whole Foods is wrapping up on Monday — giving it access to one of the strongest food brands in the United States, as well as hundreds of grocery stores in metropolitan areas. That means it’s going to be easier and easier for people to get access to great ingredients, and there’s been a continued trickle of suggestions that Amazon will be gunning for a massive business that helped Blue Apron go public — a trickle that has since tempered Wall Street’s appetite for that business. All this raises a ton of questions as to what the future of Blue Apron is as Amazon looks primed to bulldoze into its territory in a very Amazon move. But as the specter of Amazon getting into meal-kit delivery looms, let’s review really quickly what Blue Apron has going for it: It has a strong brand in meal-kit delivery. The company wouldn’t have been able to go public, much less sustain unicorn status even as its stock continues to plumme...