Zone7, which uses data and analytics to identify the potential for injuries with athletes, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding, led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from UpWest, Amicus Capital, Dave Pell, PLG Ventures, as well as current and former professional athletes.
Zone7’s AI-powered platform has logged more than 5 million hours of athlete performance, and is being used by teams in the MLB, La Liga, Champions League, MLS, collegiate athletic departments and Olympic teams.
Investors include Kristaps Porzingis of the Dallas Mavericks and former international soccer star Jordi Cruyff
“Getting injured is one of the worst experiences for any athlete,” said Kristaps Porzingis. “The technology behind Zone7 is extremely impressive and has the potential to change the landscape of sports forever.”
Zone7’s platform connects automatically to medical and athlete performance data, without requiring any new hardware or data entry for the team. The proprietary AI then creates a customized pattern recognition model for each athlete on the team to identify injury risk and enable coaches to provide training and game intervention strategies resulting in significantly reduced injury rates. Actionable recommendations are sent directly to personal mobile devices so coaches, athletic trainers, and doctors can make fast, informed decisions on the field.
To date, Zone7 has achieved a 95 percent accuracy rate and 75 percent reduction.
“Injuries in professional sports cost billions annually, but in the era of big data it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Tal Brown, co-founder and CEO of Zone7. “Professional sports franchises have massive amounts of untapped health and performance data that, when unlocked by AI, can become one of a team’s most valuable assets. By better understanding every athlete’s breaking points and implementing personalized intervention plans to prevent injuries before they occur, teams no longer have to accept injuries as an inevitability.”
Zone7’s achieved early traction in the world of professional soccer, where teams competing in La Liga, the Champions League, MLS and NCAA report a 75 percent reduction in injury rates on average. Other sports have quickly followed suit, as Zone7 was recently invited to demonstrate its technology at the Baseball Operations Technology Expo at the MLB Winter Meetings in Las Vegas and currently has pilot programs running with a number of MLB franchises.
The company was co-founded by CEO Tal Brown and CTO Eyal Eliakim, both of whom served with the Israeli Defense Forces elite intelligence unit 8200 (equivalent to the National Security Agency).
“Professional sports is, for the most part, slow to embrace medical and performance data, and as such, this has historically been a difficult target market to break into. Tal and Eyal have built a compelling product that is making teams stand up and take notice. It’s literally a game changer,” said Raanan Bar-Cohen, general partner at Resolute Ventures. “The fact that Zone7 is the first company to show injuries can be avoided by using artificial intelligence, makes us extremely excited to partner with the Zone7 team.”
