ScoreStream concluded its Series A investment round with key backing from Intel Capital — the tech giant’s venture arm — as the crowd-sourcing high school and local sports app readies its platform for global expansion.
“Could you score all the games in the world?” ScoreStream CEO Derrick Oien told SportTechie. “Could I score youth cricket in Pakistan? Or professional basketball in Nigeria? That’s the conversation that got us both excited.”
This latest funding, which also included support from Verizon Ventures and others, continues to elevate ScoreStream from plucky startup to a major resource for scores across all sports and states. In the past two years, the company has partnered with major social and traditional media companies from Snapchat to the Associated Press to iHeartMedia (which provides daily high school sports reports in 47 markets) while also having a Gatorade sponsorship for the 2016 high school football season.
As newspapers’ local sports coverage has waned, ScoreStream aims to supplant the traditional model of score reporting with a faster, more expansive system. Users input scores into the app (which is then corroborated) for rapid dissemination. ScoreStream has verified the location data of every high school football stadium in the country, for instance, to ensure accurate geofencing around the venue so that only attendees can post a score. (To do so, the company overlaid the latitude and longitude for every score update over a satellite map, with roughly 70 percent matching easily. “Then we had to clean up that last 30 percent,” Oien said, before adding with a knowing laugh: “That was a manual process.”)
Once high school football took off in the U.S., users began inputting scores from other youth sports as well as lower-division college athletics. Now, there has been growing pockets of international creep: junior hockey in Canada, American football scores in the United Kingdom and Germany, water polo in Portugal, baseball in France, lacrosse and futsal in Australia, high school rugby in South Africa and so on.
“We believe that, taking the same playbook that we used in the U.S., we’ll be able to use that to expand into traditional European sports using these niche sports as a beachhead,” Oien said.
“ScoreStream leverages machine learning and the crowd to source local sports coverage not previously available in real-time,” James Carwana, VP & GM of Intel Sports said in a statement. “Intel Sports plans to collaborate with ScoreStream to enhance the fan engagement and personalization experience around this hyper-local data on a global basis.”
ScoreStream aims to share its content in new ways, too, finding a receptive audience in the digital out-of-home market. There is potential for partners ranging from restaurants to automotive dealers. One current pilot program in Southern California posts local scores, photos and videos of high school sports on the digital boards inside 700 McDonald’s locations.
“There’s a lot of interest in hyper-local content and localized information that is unique to a specific community,” Oien said. “We’ve built up this giant framework that allows us to capture all that data and we also can filter that data and present it to customers or partners in a very targeted way.”
Oien laughs now, but he remembers just a few years ago not being able to track his alma mater’s high school football team, despite having graduated from athletic powerhouse Eisenhower High in Rialto, Calif. — which produced Football Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, recently retired offensive tackle Ryan Clady and former Marlins All-Star Jeff Conine.
“Literally, several years ago, I couldn’t get the score of the game on a Friday night,” Oien said. “And now we can.”