It’s STRIVR’s splashiest deal yet: a partnership with Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, to train and educate 150,000 Walmart employees each year.
But don’t think the virtual reality company is giving up on its roots. STRIVR, founded by ex-football coach Derek Belch, who wrote his college thesis on how virtual reality training could help improve football athletes’ performance on the field, says it isn’t losing sight of sports.
“Sports will lead the way because it’s how we started,” Belch said Friday in an interview with SportTechie. “We have a ton of awesome usage data as it relates to how athletes use VR to train, and we’ve used that to make comparisons to how everyday people can use VR to train. Now we’ll go in the reverse: see how enterprise can apply back to sports.”
Excited to finally announce we are creating a new way for Walmart to train their employees! #VRworks https://t.co/oi0W7IXggt pic.twitter.com/1j0QUwaYrV
— STRIVR Labs (@STRIVRlabs) June 1, 2017
STRIVR makes a virtual reality platform that can be used on mainstream headsets, such as Oculus and Samsung Gear VR. Its proprietary software and analytics help to analyze human and athletic performance in specific scenarios.
Its technology has rolled out as an off-the-field training platform across more than 25 college and professional football teams, including the University of Arkansas and Dallas Cowboys. It has also been deployed to enhance the fan experience through partnerships with major sports companies, such as Madison Square Garden, which offers a 360-degree video experience for fans of the New York Rangers.
Belch said the company always had “a bigger picture in mind,” but wasn’t rushing to expand into the enterprise market until Walmart came knocking on STRIVR’s door last year.
Brock McKeel, a senior director of operations at Walmart, saw the technology in action with the University of Arkansas football team and contacted STRIVR about testing it out at Walmart. After a successful pilot program that ran through the end of 2016, the companies announced the first week of June that the platform would rollout nationwide to train hundreds of thousands of Walmart employees.
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That followed an announcement in December of a $5 million funding round for STRIVR, led by Signia Venture Partners. The round included participation from the NFL. The company said it planned to use to expand its offering to enterprise clients outside of the sports industry.
“We did always have a kind of bigger picture in mind — but when Walmart called randomly, it forced the issue a little more last year and made us think, ‘OK, maybe we should be thinking to go after the larger market of non-sports training,’” Belch said.
Belch wouldn’t disclose how much money STRIVR makes, but said the company is now working with “several Fortune 100 companies” and racked up more than $10 million in revenue over the past two years. These enterprise clients add a new and diverse stream of revenue to STRIVR that can pay dividends in terms of improving the overall product, he said.
“All the teams we’re working with right now on the sports side should actually feel pretty good because it’s only going to make the product better,” Belch said. “There’s only so many sports teams out there so at some point you reach your limit in terms of revenue. Having more diverse customers is only going to make the product better.”
Players training with STRIVR have logged thousands of hours in virtual reality and reviewed more than 50,000 different plays and scenarios. STRIVR claims its software has helped to improve reaction time, pattern recognition and the decision-making process of athletes when performing in high-stress situations.
As part of this push into non-sports markets, STRIVR said corporations can use its platform to help educate and train employees in areas such as sales, operations, customer service, safety and human resources.
Walmart, for example, is using the technology for a number of those scenarios, including preparing employees for the rush of hysterical shoppers that flock to its brick-and-mortar stores in the early-morning hours of Black Friday.