Predictive modeling firm Recentive Analytics raised a $45M Series B funding round led by Wavecrest Growth Partners, with participation from Arthur Blank through AMB Sports and Entertainment and Steve Murray, a former managing partner at Revolution Growth.
This investment follows the release of a new generative AI tool called Velo that uses a natural language interface for data analysis on sales and pricing of tickets and merchandise, television viewership projections and a host of other topics.
Boston-based Recentive Analytics, an SBJ Tech Most Innovative company honoree, works with the NFL, MLB, NWSL, ESPN, Live Nation, USTA, Big Ten, Arctos, the Thunder and college programs such as the Univ. of Oklahoma.
“If you can let people access their own data in a very easy, flexible way and then be able to have all the forecasting analytics tools that we’ve built out that were much more bespoke but are now generalized, you really have something there,” CEO Andy Tabrizi said.
Some of Recentive’s differentiators are its vast, validated first- and third-party data sources and its ability to consider a wide array of inputs, such as the impact of other entertainment options in a city. “The power of what we’re doing,” Tabrizi said, “is to be able to consolidate a lot of data sources that are never really considered.”
Among the questions that users can ask are, Is there a correlation between weather and NFL merchandise sales? Which MLB team ticket prices have changed the most for the last week? What t-shirt cannon strategy has the biggest impact at an NBA game?
For a growth property such as the NWSL, Recentive helped create a schedule that maximized the potential broadcast audience by considering not only which star players and teams were participating but also “a lot of non-typical sports inputs to help build their outputs,” said Carlin Hudson, NWSL VP/Strategy.
“Looking ahead towards the next media deal,” she added, “we wanted to make sure that we were building a schedule that was optimized to really create the viewership numbers that we’re targeting and also supporting our clubs and their attendance goals.”
Chuck Torres, MLB’s VP/Broadcasting & Scheduling, said Recentive analysis is a key input into planning start times for postseason games. Last fall’s Phillies-Dodgers NLDS Game 4 in L.A., for example, fell on the same day the Eagles were slated for an 8:15pm ET “Thursday Night Football” start time. Recentive helped project viewership of different start times, with MLB ultimately landing on a 6pm first pitch.
“Anybody would think Phillies-Dodgers should be played in prime time,” Torres said, “but it wouldn’t have benefited us and/or the Philadelphia market to play those games simultaneously.”
Both MLB and NWSL send surveys to their clubs each year to solicit feedback on scheduling preferences, which Recentive ingests into his platform. Torres said that info, along with viewership projections and rules inputted for contractual obligations helped MLB determine the 60 games selected for its new package on NBC and Peacock.
Tabrizi said Velo was built with self-imposed guardrails -- it won’t try to answer questions it’s not intended to answer -- and there’s a quality assurance step built into the process, as he knows users can lose trust quickly if any guidance seems amiss.
But for questions related to anything from ticket pricing to renovation plans and more, Velo has become a helpful tool to educate executives on an ideal course of action.
“I’m very deliberate to never use the word ‘recommendation’ in anything we do because I don’t think that’s our role,” Tabrizi said. “Instead, our role is to inform and quantify the impact of decisions.”
