Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees is looked at after he was hit by a pitch in the first inning against the Kansas City Royals at Yankee Stadium on Jul. 26, 2018. (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)
When Yankees slugger Aaron Judge was hit by a 93 mile-per-hour fastball from Kansas City Royals’ Jakub Junis at the end of July, headlines about the fate of Judge and his team’s chances to win the AL East cluttered the news.
The Yankees tweeted that Judge had “a chip fracture of the right wrist” and wasn’t expected to have surgery. They estimated that he’d be swinging a bat “in a game situation” in three weeks.
Subscribers to Inside Injuries, a real-time resource for injury news and predictions, received a less optimistic analysis. After sending out alerts about Judge’s injury via push notifications and email blast, Inside Injuries warned that Judge’s recovery could be double the estimate, and that he possibly wouldn’t return to normal for “months and months” beyond that.
“Our analytics show that he should miss a lot more time (7 weeks),” the report said. “When he is cleared to return, his power won’t be the same.”
For the past three years, Inside Injuries’ reports have been a resource for media sites, fantasy sports platforms, and sports analysts. They have helped sports reporters tell their stories and assisted fantasy players with lineup strategies and draft prep. Now that U.S. sports gambling is being legalized, however, the company is fielding requests from a new type of client: sports bookers (and bettors) hungry for every and any piece of data they can get their hands on.
While a lot of major U.S. fantasy and data companies have been partnering with European companies (think FanDuel’s deal with Paddy Power Betfair) as they race to be first to market in the U.S., Inside Injuries is instead turning its attention to Europe and reaching overseas. The company, which already provides injury reports for every player in the NBA, MLB, and the NFL, will launch its first database for a league based abroad next month when it rolls out soccer reports across the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League.
Initially self-funded as the pet project of founder Dr. Anand Lalaji, currently the company’s chief medical officer, Inside Injuries is now embarking on its first investment round. Inside Injuries CEO Tracy Hankin said the company plans to use the Series A to further international expansion, particularly into new sports with robust communities where gambling has already been legalized (cricket and tennis, for example), and to build more sophisticated data science tools to provide even more granular predictions and analyses.
“We want to continue to scale internationally and use investment funds to help us do that,” Hankin said. “It will open more doors not only to fantasy contests but also the sports betting community.”
Inside Injuries currently provides a mix of free and paid-for services. Anyone can see basic injury information and projections, while a $4.99 monthly membership earns users detailed injury analyses from medical experts and weekly sit/start strategy insights for fantasy.
The company deploys data crawlers to scrub the web in as many legitimate places as publicly accessible to gather historical data about athletes dating back a “statistically significant” three years. The information it gathers is then crunched through proprietary algorithms along with historical recovery and injury data and athlete biometrics to provide an overall picture of an athlete’s health, likelihood they’ll play or be injured in the next game, and recovery time if they’re already on the disabled list.
Inside Injuries also builds custom analyses for partners, which is where the company has so far seen the most interest from potential customers in the sports gambling industry.
Sports bookers in the U.S. “tend to be interested in everything,” seemingly unsure which statistics will be the most relevant or popular down the road in regards to their betting clients. Bookmakers are also scooping up as much data as possible to gain an edge over their competitors when setting lines.
“They may want to keep certain calculations (private) to improve what they’re doing on the back end. It’s all inclusive—they have indicated that they’re interested in all of it,” said Hankin.
The company now identifies sports media, fantasy platforms and the newly-added sports betting client as its “primary targets for growth,” she said.
Rather than stay put in the U.S. and partner with an incoming foreign company that already has experience in the gambling industry (such as FanDuel’s strategy with Paddy Power), Inside Injuries believes the state-by-state rollout of sports betting in the U.S. will be slow. Its strategy, therefore, is to stake ground in places where gambling is already legalized, which will establish its brand in established gambling markets, help to grow its international community and well-equip the company to deal with the evolving betting landscape in the U.S. as it shakes out over the next few years.
“I feel like there’s so many people who already have betting operations or are bookmakers/oddsmakers internationally, who are moving into the U.S. And it seems like the folks who are doing that are limited in how they can operate in the U.S. today, but they’re still coming in. It’s almost like there’s a lot of excitement from those companies (and others launching in the U.S.) in grabbing all the content and data they can in this initial phase,” Hankin said. “I think it’s going to take a little while not only for the regulatory stuff to get approved, but also for people to sift through and realize what data and info is really going to be important to gain an audience of sports bettors and what data/info is really going to be valuable. We want to be one of the providers that’s seen as really credible and valuable, and we know that will take a while for everyone to work through.”
Inside Injuries currently only has four full-time employees (all women except for Dr. Lalaji). A successful funding round would arm it with the tools to more rapidly scale and position the brand as a go-to source of injury data, one of the many pieces of information it hopes people one day use to place real-money wagers in the U.S.
