SBJ Power Up: Springbok Analytics links with Unrivaled, secures funding round

S prawled across four parking spots outside Wayfair Arena in suburban Miami earlier this month sat a long, white trailer. But this wasn’t part of a TV broadcast production, nor was it for a movie star, although nearly every player in the new Unrivaled basketball league took turns ascending the metal stairs and entering.

Inside, a portable MRI machine needed only 10 minutes to scan the women’s lower bodies, at which point AI algorithms from Springbok Analytics took the 2D imaging and converted them into 3D digital twins that can be used for muscle analysis — establishing baselines that can be used to individualize training and flag latent injury risk. 

Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s league that debuted on Jan. 17 in Miami, is the latest league to partner with Springbok Analytics. In the past two years alone, Springbok has collaborated with three of the five biggest North American sports leagues: It graduated from NBA Launchpad; completed data collection on an NFL-funded research project into hamstring injuries; and began the initial phase of an MLB-backed study into pitcher health. 

Now boosting Springbok’s rapid growth across pro sports and into broader populations is a newly closed, oversubscribed $5 million Series A led by Transition Equity Partners , which also led a $3 million seed round in 2023. Joining the investment were the NBA, which added to its initial equity stake from Launchpad, and Cartan Capital , a sports tech venture firm led by former pro tennis player CiCi Bellis . 

“This is a clear sign that our current and new investors are excited to see us scale all aspects of our business,” Springbok CEO Scott Magargee said, “and from a dollars-in-the-door perspective, it allows us to advance what we believe is our global leadership in the area of muscle analysis for large demographics of athletes and patients across the entire health care landscape.” 

The interactive reports Springbok produces are musculoskeletal avatars shaded various hues of red, orange, tan and blue that detail muscle asymmetries, fat infiltration and a proprietary score comparing a person’s muscle size with others of similar sex, size and sport. Springbok recently released sport-specific databases for men’s pro basketball and soccer athletes — a women’s soccer counterpart is planned soon — for more apt comparisons. It received FDA clearance in October on its flagship lower-body scan, and added core and upper-body scans to what previously was lower extremity only. 

Such a tool is even more important when the athletes are such physical outliers as in the NBA. More than 100 players are in that database, and in addition to partnering with nearly half the league’s teams, Springbok continues working at the league level during the pre-draft process. 

“Their work with us proved that this is a really interesting new dataset in elite sports,” said NBA Senior Vice President Tom Ryan , who oversees Launchpad and all basketball R&D. “Springbok data is starting to become an important piece of the puzzle to help support player health and performance initiatives. That’s really the story: It’s very strategic for us, both at the league and team level.” 

The continued strategic relationship helped facilitate the additional funding, NBA Investments Associate Vice President Pat Crouch added. “First and foremost, for companies that come out of the NBA’s Launchpad program, we look for follow-on investment opportunities when there is a continued strategic relationship. We only invest in companies where there’s some type of commercial partnership, at either the league or the team level, that has gained meaningful traction and has upside to continue to grow and expand.”

Notably, Springbok has no true competitor and a 15-year head start on understanding the use of this data, making it “a piece of the puzzle that nobody else is,” said Magargee.

“The fact that our expertise is the technology, but also in human performance and muscle physiology, we know where to keep going with it in a way that’s meaningful,” said Silvia Blemker , Springbok’s chief scientific officer. She added that one recently devised new metric is an objective injury severity score, which can quantitatively assess a strain or sprain rather than rely on a human practitioner to subjectively evaluate it. 

Though Springbok Analytics’ work in sports has intensified in recent years, the foundational technology has roots dating back to 2009 and Blemker’s biomedical engineering lab at the University of Virginia. The company’s headquarters remain in Charlottesville, sitting in a nondescript office at one end of its pedestrian-friendly Downtown Mall. Springbok’s dual recognition in 2024 from SBJ Tech — as a Most Innovative Sports Tech company and SBJ Tech Award winner for Best in Athlete Performance — prominently greets visitors.

In those early days, Blemker was working on solutions to aid treatments of cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy when the lab began developing the machine learning to extrapolate 3D data from MRIs. Those life science use-cases remain a part of Springbok’s mission, while also adding the human performance sector that makes it a highly differentiated product appealing to investors. 

“Not only do we really believe in the team, but the technology, we think, is pretty unprecedented, especially with the years of R&D,” Bellis said, “and then the beachhead that they’ve had into the sports market is super interesting, because they can really instantly provide value to these sports teams and instantly give them money back, so to say, by having this preventative health measure for athletes.”

That expediency of the scans — much quicker than what’s needed for traditional MRIs — has helped Springbok amass its large elite athlete databases, including a thousand college and pro American football players, Blemker said. Those were collected to build a hamstring injury predictive index in collaboration with researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Australian Catholic University, and funded by a $4 million grant awarded by the NFL’s Scientific Advisory Board.  

It’s that rich dataset, as much as any algorithm or an investment check, that is sparking Springbok’s growth — and the same competitive advantage will only continue to grow the same way it started. 

“It’s taken us time,” Magargee said, “and it’s taken us partnerships.” 

Mental performance app alphabeats is forming an advisory council – called the “alphabeats Performance Collective” – comprised of athletes and mental performance specialists to help promote and further develop its product.

The first announced member of the group, which will be added to in the coming weeks, is American tennis pro Austin Krajicek, an alphabeats user since last year and a proponent of the tech.

“I’m really excited to be able to help some other athletes,” Krajicek told SBJ. “It’s a way for me to share some experiences, and then hopefully make the product better to reach not only the athletic field, but the business world and different areas where the mental side is huge.”

Founded in 2019, alphabeats has developed algorithms that respond to users’ brain activity – sourced from EEG sensor-embedded headwear – while listening to music. Ultimately, through drills housed in an accompanying mobile app, their goal is to train users to regulate their “alpha” brainwaves, which are typically associated with calmness. Earlier this month, the company partnered with SleepScore Labs to integrate sleep data into its platform as well.

Krajicek said he uses the technology almost every day as part of his tennis training, particularly during a recent stretch in which he was recovering from an ankle injury.

“[There were] five or six days where I was really struggling to walk around,” he said. “So that was a really helpful thing to have to reset my state of mind.”

Jorrit DeVries, the company’s CEO, said the Performance Collective will aim to remotely meet at least once per quarter, and once per year in person.

“It’ll be about getting feedback on the product, early access to new releases, and capturing the voice of the athlete as part of that process,” DeVries said. “It’s also an opportunity to create a network of ambassadors that help to spread the word in this noisy, fragmented space of sports performance.”

MLB is preparing the automated ball-strike system, or ABS, for "its biggest test yet this spring training." The upcoming spring experiment "will employ the 'challenge' system," in which human umpires "will still make the vast majority of calls themselves." Each team "will start a game with two challenges it can issue to an umpire, who will then rely on the automated ball-strike system to review the pitch." More than 60% of spring games will feature ABS, with the D-backs set to use it 29 times -- the most in the league -- and the Cubs set for the fewest chances at seven. The average team in the Cactus League "will have 21 games featuring the automated zone, with half of its 10 ballparks expected to feature the system." The average Grapefruit League team "will play 19 games with an automated zone, with the system available in eight of 13 parks." MLB and the umpires worked out a five-year CBA in December "that allowed the league the right to implement ABS" (THE ATHLETIC, 1/24).

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