SUNCOOK – SportsVisio CEO Jason Syverson is an avid basketball player. He has played the game his entire life and continues to play in an adult league in Concord. A few years ago, he noticed “a gap in the market,” in the words of SportsVisio account executive Emmett Roy.
Syverson realized that game statistics compiled manually by human scorekeepers were limited, prone to human error, and did necessarily offer a full, accurate account of the game. Basketball is fast paced; actions like steals, turnovers, and offensive rebounds can be critical to the outcome but often go unnoticed. This realization led to the creation of Suncook-based startup SportVisio.
The company’s first product is a basketball app, which gives players access to all of those often-overlooked statistics, plus box scores and easy-to-sort video highlights.
The company employs computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence, to track the performance of individual players during the game. This is the same technology that Tesla’s self-driving cars use to identify other vehicles and obstacles in roadways, said Roy.
But in SportsVisio’s case, “we have trained the algorithm to identify certain actions that happen in basketball,” he explained.
According to Roy, the SportsVisio app is easy to use. You simply film your game, even with a smartphone, upload the raw footage, and your stats and video highlights will be available in the app within 24 hours.
“We provide all these stats, and nothing is missing,” said Roy.
The app is targeted to a variety of users. Student athletes and their parents use the app to track performance season over season and for college recruitment purposes. Coaches use it to improve their team’s overall performance. Game data can also be accessed via SportsVisio’s Web platform, which some of their basketball league customer use as a marketing tool.
To date, around 800 teams around the world – from the US and Canada to Europe and South America – use SportsVisio’s basketball app. But one of those teams is a little closer to home.
Concord’s Trinity High School was an early adopter of the technology, and its feedback was instrumental in helping the company design its product, Roy reported. “Trinity has been with us from the start.”
The New Hampshire ties do not end there. In addition to CEO Syverson, much of the company’s management team lives in the Granite State, including the COO, product manager, and software lead. Several employees are graduates of UNH’s Entrepreneurship Center.
“SportsVisio has built its whole team around the NH area,” Roy confirmed. “This is where we built our network.”
In fact, the company’s highest profile employee also has close ties to the region. Current Miami Heat star and New Castle, NH, native Duncan Robinson is a strategic advisor and brand ambassador, lending his expertise as both a professional basketball player and a student of the game. SportsVisio customers can watch Robinson’s 2013 championship game with Phillips Exeter Academy – where he shot 100% from the field – in the app.
For now, SportsVisio’s app supports basketball, but it has a volleyball option currently in beta testing. In the future, the company plans to offer soccer and baseball as well.
As with many technology companies, SportsVisio is stocked with experts in software engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Their resumes include tenures at Microsoft, IBM Research, BAE Systems, and DARPA.
But it is their shared passion for sports that really makes the company unique, said Roy.
“We are all athletes or ex-athletes and really passionate about sports,” he confirmed. “We are passionate about basketball and technology, and that is what drives innovation.”
