Dublin-based Kitman Labs, a sports analytics company that uses artificial intelligence to increase athlete performance and health, announced that it has raised $52M (approx €45M) in a fresh round of funding. With this, the company has now raised a total funding of $82M (approx €70.98M) to date.
The funding was led by Guggenheim Investments (on behalf of certain of its managed accounts), a global asset investment and advisory firm with more than $259B in AUM.
Capital utilisation
The raised capital will help the company to invest in data science and development of its platform to help teams consolidate more data from across their organisation into a single platform, improve and automate workflows for all departments in a sports team, and turn data into powerful intelligence.
Further, the funds will also help Kitman Labs to hire new talents for its product development. The company has witnessed a growth of 56 per cent a year in global headcounts and is looking to grow its current team of 125 by 100 people, an 80 per cent increase in the size of the company.
Stephen Smith, founder and CEO of Kitman Labs, says, “We are empowering teams to move quickly into the new paradigm for sports performance and talent strategy, characterised 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 centralised 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,” adds Smith.
Using AI to increase athlete performance and health
Many elite sports leagues and teams have been recording amounts of player data from wearables, tracking systems, and legacy point solutions often used by a single department.
According to Kitman Labs’ statement, 2.5 million data points per athlete will be gathered this year. And by 2025, it may increase to 230 million data points per athlete — an increase of over 9,000 per cent. With this influx, organisations around the globe are currently faced with the challenge of finding meaningful insights in this data that can be shared by the entire organisation.
This is where Kitman Labs looks to make a difference. Founded in 2012 by Stephen Smith, the company claims to fundamentally change how data is used in sport to enhance performance and reduce injury risk.
Kitman Labs has created an operating system for sport that helps transform data from point solutions into actionable, team-specific insights with advanced analytics to guide collaborative decisions about talent strategies, performance, health and safety, and youth development.
Over 700 elite teams across the NFL, NHL, MLB, NCAA, English Premier League, La Liga, Serie A Bundesliga, Pro14, Premiership Rugby, and Japan’s Top League use the company’s technology. The company has a presence in the US, Ireland, the UK, Central Europe, Australia, and Japan.
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