Stadia Ventures, the growing sports accelerator out of St. Louis, has announced the selection of five sports startups that will be entering their Spring 2016 Sports Accelerator program. Here they are in alphabetical order:
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Behind The Picks (Scottsdale, AZ) – Behind the Picks is a data analytics service that utilizes proprietary algorithms to predict sports outcomes.
EZ Waves (Charleston, SC) – EZ Waves is Uber for boating, providing easy, real-time scheduling and bookkeeping for boat and equipment rentals. Search, book and go in minutes!
Leaguer (NYC, NY) – Leaguer is a commerce and communications hub for recreational sports leagues that provides easy, customizable management and registration software.
Meridix (Napierville, IL) – Meridix allows anyone to create ESPN-like live webcasts using a smartphone without a production truck.
Senaptec (Beaverton, OR) – Senaptec provides a proprietary software/hardware system that can assess, analyze, and improve sensorimotor skills.
Starting today, these startups will begin the three month Stadia Accelerator Spring program. One of the most valuable aspects of this program comes from Stadia pairing each startup with a strategic mentor within the sports industry.
Every week for the next twelve weeks, the founders of each of the five startups will travel to St. Louis for targeted mentoring and business consulting with the Stadia team. With this comes specific curriculum that Stadia has created to help the companies with business strategy, national and international distribution, partnerships, social media marketing and investor relations.
Additionally, the spring program will host guest speakers from from Under Armour, Wilson Sporting Goods, NASCAR, IBM Watson, STATS, San Francisco 49ers, San Francisco Giants, Minor League Baseball, NCAA, plus the steady support from the hometown St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Blues.
“We are extremely excited about our new cohort of portfolio companies” says Art Chou, Managing Director of Stadia Ventures. “These companies represent a selection process that included input from over fifty industry executives from around the world. Sports innovation is thriving and Stadia is excited to help these companies get to the next level.”
Stadia Ventures is quickly turning St. Louis into a hub for sports innovation. In just the last year it has been exciting to witness first-hand the progress this program has made (full disclosure, I am on the Stadia Ventures Advisory Board).
As a brief reminder, here are the four companies in the first Stadia cohort from the fall of 2015. For a much more detailed look at these companies please check out our Profile on them in our Startup Profiles Series.
- Fishidy is the go-to digital platform that helps over 400,000 fishermen and anglerssucceed on the water through authoritative fishing maps and social sharing. Think of it as the “Waze” of Fishing.
- LEIF Tech is the world’s only electric skateboard that moves like a snowboard. LEIF brings to the pavement those smooth sideways moves that you can only get on a mountain or a wave – for up to 20mph and with 8 miles of riding range perswappable battery pack.
- Rookies makes it easy to create, print and share fully customized baseball cards via physical cards or virtual ones trades through social media channels. With 1,000,000 cards printed in their first year, they spare no detail in creating packs of physical baseball cards that rival the ones you opened as kids.
- Winning Identity is a customizable software platform that strives to be the easy button for golf. Through their partnerships with Golf Channel, Golf Channel Academy and others, they maximize athletic performance and heighten motivation for new generations of golfers in one centralized location.