Three Pacific Northwest Startups Present At TPG’s Sports Tank

Funding and guidance.  To launch a successful startup, you must have both of these.  In the sports/fitness niche, it’s all about differentiating yourself from your potential competitors, as we’ve discussed before.  TPG Sports, which has been in sports talent management for more than 20 years, is helping sports startups with both funding and guidance a second year running, and Pacific Northwest startups benefited from the efforts.

For the second year in a row, TPG Sports hosted Sports Tank, its hybrid startup pitch event and mini accelerator.  On April 1^st, 10 startups presented pitches, and three of the 10, nearly half the United States-based startups, are headquartered in the Pac-NW.

IdealSeat

IdealSeat, based in Seattle, was made for baseball fans.  How many times have you been to Safeco and wondered where the best seats for families are?  Or where you should sit to catch a foul ball or even a home run?

This startup, led by CEO Joel Carben, aims to answer those questions using data from fan experiences to create holistic insights about sports and entertainment venues.  In 2012, when IdealSeat was announced, Carben and colleagues spent the season tracking where foul balls landed in Safeco.  By November of 2015, they were testing in NFL, NBA, and MLS venues.

There are already a lot of fan experience apps out there, a handful of which have been discussed in this column.  Yet IdealSeat’s pitch could take choosing a seat to a higher level.  Focusing on “ticket discovery, game-day decisions, and in-game experiences,” according to its site, wants to allow fans to pick the shady spots if they want them.  Or a block of seats nearest to other diehards they may not know in order to meet new people.  As the fans, you control your choices, and therefore, the data.

IdealSeat’s vision has increased from focusing on catching souvenir baseballs to optimizing the entire fan experience.  Not yet available on the app store, IdealSeat is proving that big data isn’t just for analyzing athletes’ performance, but can be a valuable business tool for customer-driven decisions.

Matcherino

If eSports are your thing, Matcherino, also based in Seattle, may be the startup for you.  Unlike traditional eSports platforms, allows fans to crowdfund tournaments and matches among eSports athletes.

Any gamer registered with Twitch or who livestreams their gaming via another channel can be nominated by fans to participate in one-on-one matches or in tournaments.  Fans can then donate money to fund the player pool, which is held in escrow.  Matcherino then plays host to the competition, and the funds are distributed among the players.

Matcherino isn’t the only eSports startup to pitch Sports Tank this year.  Hashplay, one of the international entrants, is capitalizing on the intersection of gaming and virtual reality.  This startup, from Germany, will allow gamers to live stream in 2D, 3D, and virtual reality; fans will be able to watch whichever optimized stream they choose.

Combine both Matcherino and Hashplay, and gamers and their fans will end up with a highly-immersive, highly-competitive experience.

Senaptec

For any high-performance athlete, training the brain is just as important as training the body.  Senaptec, based in Beaverton, Oregon, is designing apps and training assessments to do just that.

In order to improve athletes’ sensorimotor skills, Senaptec begins with a series of 10 assessments.  Measuring everything from visual clarity to decision-making, the assessments are then measured by Senaptec’s cloud-based analyzer.  This creates a personalized sensory performance report that compares the athlete’s performance to a peer group.

Using data to track performance among four strengths and four areas where improvement is necessary, Senaptec then offers customized training.  Training is offered via the same station that assesses performance, the Sensory Station.  It’s also offered via the Senaptec Strobe, which limits athletes’ fields of vision, thus forcing them to fill in gaps with visualization and decision-making.

Senaptec’s closest competition at Sports Tank was Physmodo, based in Texas.  Physmodo allows physical therapists and sports scientists to measure athletic performance off the field in order to heal and prevent injuries.

Senaptec will train the brain, Physmodo will train the body.

Sports Tank’s Model

The beauty of presenting at Sports Tank is that the startups who pitch at the event are competing for funding, but they are also facing a panel of professionals who offer their advice.  Unlike its namesake, Shark Tank, Sports Tank’s panel of more than 10 sports professionals and entrepreneurs doesn’t just listen to pitches but interacts with the pitchers to offer advice, not just negotiate for investments.

Even if a startup’s founders don’t walk away from Sports Tank with funding, they’ll walk away with a little more guidance for the next time.