Small business in the city of St. Louis has heavily benefitted from the use of accelerators. The state of Missouri has the fourth highest amount of business accelerators in the U.S., with accelerators focusing on technology firms, agribusiness, biotechnology, women-owned startups and financial firms.
Now, two St. Louis natives are looking into another profitable and booming industry—sports technology.
Art Chou and Tim Hayden are launching Stadia Accelerator, an enterprise designed to bridge certain gaps between big companies and startups.
Increasingly, big companies have looked to startups, instead of their own research and development teams to do much of the innovation in the marketplace. Then, they purchase the startup and absorb it into their own business.
Stadia will attempt to foster this sort of relationship, by first investing money into a startup and then providing the startup with a period of intensive mentorship. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, they plan to invest $100,000 into five companies every six months, for which they are attempting to raise $10 million so that they can fund the accelerator for five years. Additionally, they have a list of 50 potential mentors, which includes big names in the sports industry like Jacksonville Jaguars President Mark Lamping and St. Louis Rams executive Kevin Demoff. They also have a number of names in the sporting goods industry involved, like Rawlings, a company that Chou formerly worked for.
Stadia hopes all of these industry veterans will seek to validate the startups that they are working with, making it easier for these small businesses to find investors or the eye of bigger companies.
Stadia is on the front end of a trend in recent months for accelerators in the sports sector. In April, the L.A. Dodgers, in conjunction with advertising agency R/GA, announced that they would be creating a sports accelerator. They will choose ten companies, whose businesses appear both profitable and useful for the Dodgers, through which to invest and mentor.
With the Dodgers’ accelerator, each company will receive $120,000 and 3 months with more than 80 mentors from the variety of contacts the Dodgers’ organization possesses. All of this will culminate with a Demo Day in November.
Both Stadia and the Dodgers emphasized that technology has filled the sports industry with more opportunities and innovation than ever before. Since the sports world is a relatively new territory for accelerators like these, their launches, mere months apart, only add to the notion that the landscape of the sports industry is beginning to evolve through technology .