SportsVisio Raises $3M Seed Round for AI-Driven Basketball Analysis

As AI technology seeps into every level of athletic competition, SportsVisio has raised $3 million to change how basketball action is captured.

The company uses computer vision and deep learning applications to allow players, observers and coaches to film games using a phone on a tripod and have statistics automatically tallied. SportsVisio’s platform also offers highlight-creation tools. 

“I’ve been playing hoops for about 30 years, my kids all played, I’ve coached for a dozen years,” SportsVisio CEO Jason Syversen said in an interview. “And I had this idea to say, what if we could use AI to automatically create stats and highlights to help coaches do a better job, have parents get highlight clips of their kids, help players who want to get better, or just enjoy the game more?” 

Founded in 2021, SportsVisio’s functionality revolves around the ability for its program to detect jersey numbers in videos and attribute various sports actions to the players wearing them. In addition to being a longtime amateur basketball player, Syversen is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency alum with multiple startups on his resume. He said SportsVisio is already thinking about how its tech could apply to other sports, with plans to build further features that are made possible by converting real-world action into digital components. 

Sapphire Sport led the funding round after closing a $181 million fund with the intention of backing early stage, sports-adjacent tech companies.

“When we started Sapphire Sport, the vision was technology investors with a unique LP base of sports owners,” co-founding partner Doug Higgins said. “SportsVisio is exactly the kind of company we’re looking for … It’s a technical product that’s going to need to have some go-to-market help.”

The overarching Sapphire Ventures firm said in July that it plans to invest more than $1 billion in AI-related startups across business sectors, calling recent advances “a profound technology shift.”

“We’re obviously super interested in how AI technologies are going to be applied to the greater sports world at all levels from, you know, youth sports to amateur to pros,” Higgins said. “It’s clear you’re gonna need the entrepreneurs that have that true tech DNA … We’ve seen companies that have come before Jason and SportsVisio try to tackle this space, but we felt that the technologies and the products are either too hardware intensive [or] too custom-built, and we were really looking for that true horizontal technology that could be applied to sport.”

While machine learning and other AI tools have the potential to change how sports are played and watched on the biggest stages, their ability to democratize access to training knowledge and content creation will be first felt at lower levels of the game. With just a phone in hand, amateurs of tomorrow may be able to generate near-professional levels of both coaching recommendations and action commentary.