{"id":42661,"date":"2023-10-20T15:22:50","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/how-one-australian-startup-is-riding-the-rise-of-the-sports-analytics-industry-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:22:50","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:22:50","slug":"how-one-australian-startup-is-riding-the-rise-of-the-sports-analytics-industry-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/how-one-australian-startup-is-riding-the-rise-of-the-sports-analytics-industry-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"How one Australian startup is riding the rise of the sports analytics industry – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Catapult Sports chairman Adir Shiffman is sceptical about the rise of consumer wearables, which is surprising given he\u2019s the chairman of the world\u2019s biggest provider of GPS tracking devices that help sports teams monitor and improve the performance of athletes.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI feel the excitement around wearables is just general activity fracas and may or may not turn out to be a real market,\u2019\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe market potential feels huge, but I\u2019ve yet to meet a single person who\u2019s said a wearable technology has changed my life.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhen consumers get a wearable they\u2019re initially excited, and then they start to wonder if it can help you over the long term. I think that\u2019s the challenge with wearables.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Melbourne-based Catapult Sports made headlines recently after it attracted investment from celebrity investor and owner of the NBA\u2019s Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban.<\/p>\n

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The Australian Financial Review<\/i> reported the company was considering a potential initial public offering later this year, but Shiffman was non-committal.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe way I talk about our funding is like this, I led a $3.5 million series A round in the last quarter of 2013, and that enabled us to keep the foot on the accelerator,\u2019\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re working through a number of options that have been attractive and within a few months we\u2019ll have more to say about the capital structure of the company.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Catapult Sport\u2019s clients include football clubs AC Milan and Aston Villa, the New York Knicks NBA franchise, almost half of the NFL\u2019s 32 teams and college football\u2019s most recent national championship winning program Florida State University.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Shiffman says America, and the NFL in particular, had lagged behind other nations in the sports analytics field until quite recently.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe salary cap of the NFL club is $137 million dollars a year and they also have this very wide talent pool, so if they want to have an improvement in performance, they don\u2019t need to squeeze more drops out of the orange,\u2019\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The rise of the sports analytics industry is showing no signs of stopping, according to Shiffman, particularly with the rise of cloud computing.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI think the hottest thing at the moment that\u2019s going on in terms of tech business models is B2B cloud-based SaaS models,\u2019\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a mouthful but it\u2019s pretty amazing and with the rise of the cloud there\u2019s now this ability to create extremely sophisticated software and stick it in the cloud, host it in the cloud.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just unbeatable.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Catapult Sports chairman Adir Shiffman is sceptical about the rise of consumer wearables, which is surprising given he\u2019s the chairman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}