Sporting Innovations, the 5-year-old sports technology offshoot of Major League Soccer club Sporting Kansas City, is rebranding itself as FanThreeSixty in an effort to link more directly with its flagship product, the FanThreeSixty platform.
Company executives described the new company brand and logo, arriving after a six-month process, as a “natural evolution.”
“We wanted a brand that clearly reflects who we are,” said Robb Heineman, FanThreeSixty chief executive and co-owner. “The FanThreeSixty platform is so important, and this represents a much more direct and accurate statement to the marketplace.”
The FanThreeSixty platform aggregates multiple forms of fan data and then offers an array of analytic functions to understand preferences and behaviors and in turn help teams, leagues and venue operators generate more revenue, develop more relevant content and deepen fan relationships. Key clients have included the U.S. Tennis Association, Speedway Motorsports Inc. and Oklahoma State University, among others.
The rebranding arrives amid a period of marked change for FanThreeSixty. The company last summer fired co-founder and co-chief executive Asim Pasha, accusing him of using company resources to aid in the development of a competing outfit. A legal dispute in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri continues, and Pasha has filed a counterclaim against the company.
Heineman declined to discuss the Pasha matter in detail, but said, “in any early stage technology company, there are going to be challenges.”
FanThreeSixty in the meantime has doubled its employee count to 50 people since the start of 2015 and intends to maintain a similar rate of personnel growth this year. There was no accompanying recapitalization or other ownership shift, but FanThreeSixty executives described the operation as well funded.
“The FanThreeSixty platform has grown much stronger, and we realized we had something we could really build around,” said Cliff Illig, FanThreeSixty chairman. “You don’t want to be creating conflicts with the name game in the marketplace, and this signals our intent to the industry much more clearly. We have a lot of ideas on where we can take this product next.”
