Zelus Series A Points to Sports Analytics’ Continued Growth Potential
Sports data analysis company Zelus Analytics has raised what it plans to be the first part of a Series A round as it expands its client base beyond professional teams.
The latest fundraising includes participation from Kevin Durant’s 35 Ventures and Billy Beane, as well as Teamworthy Ventures and Gametime Capital. They join existing investor RedBird Capital. Financial details have not been disclosed.
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Founded in 2019, Zelus supports internal stats groups within team partners across baseball, basketball, hockey, football, cricket and soccer. The company, based in Austin, Texas, offers a platform that makes it easier for teams to generate actionable insights from the increasingly large data sets now available. As player and ball tracking has evolved to include limb position data, those tools have become more valuable—and complicated.
Teams have continued increasing their internal capabilities, growing staff by 17% year-over-year on average, according to Zelus CEO Doug Fearing. Still, he sees a market for Zelus’ capabilities, starting with its models using tracking data to calculate gains in expected points that otherwise don’t show up in the box score.
Those models can help teams identify undervalued players on the market and ways to get the most out of athletes on the current roster.
With a distributed workforce, Zelus now includes over 70 technical staff members across engineering, research and product-oriented departments.
“In leveraging state-of-the-art probabilistic modeling and machine learning techniques, Zelus sets the standard in sports analytics,” Beane said in a statement. “Their expertise in dissecting complex data is unparalleled. As both a customer and an investor, I am incredibly optimistic about the transformative impact Zelus is poised to make.”
Access to copious amounts of data has also expanded to other markets, such as college sports, where Zelus aims to grow as well. The company is also looking at how its features could be utilized by other departments and outfits, from sports betting companies to marketing experts. Esports analytics may emerge as well.
“Evaluating player and team talent is a useful product in and of itself, whether that’s in the context of financial products or agencies or sponsorship,” Fearing said. “There are a lot of high-value decisions made around player performance or adjacent to player performance, and so being able to provide best-in class-projections creates a lot of opportunities there.”
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