IBM has long invested in technology startups through its in-house, $500 million venture fund, IBM Ventures. That vehicle is now turning its eye to opportunities in sports technology, IBM’s Global Head of Venture Capital Emily Fontaine told SBJ after an sports tech startup pitch challenge IBM hosted at its Manhattan headquarters Thursday afternoon.
“It’s to better understand the market, what’s out there — and drive real excitement around doing a [proof-of-concept] with these startups,” Fontaine said of the pitch challenge. “Then, how well that goes [informs] investment we would potentially want to put into some of these startups.”
IBM Ventures typically traffics in $500,000-$15M minority investments in seed-stage to Series C startups. Fontaine said the fund does not have a specific carve-out for sports, but, like its investments in other industries (e.g., generative AI platform Writer and deepfake detection company Reality Defender) is looking for the “best startups that help drive innovation across our client base.”
The event on Thursday was part of a broader slate of events IBM hosted as a sponsor of a16z’s “Tech Week,” and put six sports technology startups in front of a four-person panel of judges: IBM Program Directors of Sports & Entertainment Elizabeth O’Brien, a 2017 SBJ Game Changer, and Kristi Kolski; Comcast Ventures Partner Mike Shapiro; and USTA Ventures Senior Director of Digital Strategy & Business Development Michael Hughes. No winner was selected, but the event could yield one or two of the startups an invite to a final pitch competition at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon this November, where the grand prize is a potential $100,000 commitment towards a proof-of-concept project. Other competitors will be sourced from similar pitch challenges staged by IBM and tech events company Web Summit throughout the year.
The six companies that presented on Thursday are:
- Complete Sports: an operating system for turning athlete performance data, ingested from disparate wearable technologies, into actionable insights
- Datacurve: a fan identity company that’s flagship platform, branded “Aura,” consolidates engagement data from streaming, broadcast, sponsorship, venues and owned digital channels to create fan profiles
- SportFeed: an API provider with products that pull links to sports highlights and breaking news posted to public social media platforms
- Lingopal: a real-time, AI-powered language translation platform with applications in sports livestreaming (and raised a $14M Series A last year)
- Nameless and DatumIQ: two platforms that connect siloed data across different CRMs and databases (e.g., commercial, fan engagement, etc.)
Shapiro, who started with Comcast Ventures in January, said his involvement with the event grew out of a relationship between Comcast Ventures’ Platform Lead Conor Cook and IBM. Comcast discontinued its 5-year-old SportsTech startup accelerator program this year but is still looking to invest in the space. Shapiro said Comcast Ventures’ typical check size — as a co-investor, for Series A to Series B-range companies — for sports stakes is in the $2M-$4M range.
“What you see with a program like [the SportsTech accelerator] — there are certain things that are great success,” Shapiro said, calling out, as one example, an integration by Satisfi Labs and PAM into the Comcast Spectacor-owned Flyers’ app. “Not every partner had the bandwidth to take on the company that they were given. And not every company had the ability to execute in a six-month timeline. You compress and put, to me, an unneeded burden on both sides. Now we have an always-on, evergreen, let’s just find the best opportunities.”
