Arria NLG Acquires Boost Sport AI as Part of Sports Expansion
Natural language and analytics company Arria NLG has acquired Boost Sport AI, a sports data startup, as it looks to help groups across sports get more out of advanced stats.
Boost Sport, led by CEO and former professional basketball player Mustafa Abdul-Hamid, started as a computer vision tool to help college basketball coaches track their players. Boost Sport licensed Arria’s tech to automatically generate simple insights from the data in normal language. It then partnered with Arria as it expanded its client base beyond teams, building tools for content companies and sports marketers looking to integrate relevant stats into their copy with ease.
“We’ve got several large clients that we would have had trouble serving on our own, and now we can attack those revenue opportunities,” Abdul-Hamid said.
Going forward, he identified three main lines of business. First, Boost Sport will continue serving teams. This year, it has partnered with 25 schools, including UCLA and the University of Florida. It’s also developing an insights service for companies as well as fans, sharing stats and stories around the numbers, which it plans to launch for March Madness. Lastly, the company is expanding its content generation platform for brands, like gambling operators that are looking for unique ways to engage their customers.
Joining Abdul-Hamid at Arria will be CTO Inga Nakhmanson, director of analytics Jorge Costa (who previously worked at the NBA), and senior VP of marketing Tim Mitchell (an ex-Nike executive), as part of a team of roughly 15 employees. TitletownTech—a partnership between the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft—Stadia Ventures and others will now be Arria backers through their investments in Boost Sport.
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