Numberfire Wants to Improve Your Fantasy Odds by 30 Percent
By Maddy Perkins
Anyone who plays fantasy football knows the feeling: you find yourself rooting for your fantasy team like it’s a real football team. Chances are your roster may not be full of players on the hometown NFL team you root for every Sunday. Maybe you’re a New England fan who finds yourself secretly hoping that the Jets defense will do well. The point is: there’s a lot of pride on the line.
Carnegie Mellon alum, two-time All-American Athlete and former Yahoo! software engineer Nik Bonaddio felt that way when it came to his fantasy league. He had always loved sports. Playing fantasy with his friends, he had always thought there had to be a smarter, more quantitative way of analyzing sports data.
One spring evening in 2009, he wound up playing Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? on national television. He ended up taking home $100,000.
Bonaddio quit his job the next day.
And while most people would blow their winnings on a vacation or a fancy car, Bonaddio holed himself in his apartment and started coding. What he ended up with was the first version of numberFire: A start-up sports analytics platform that uses quantitative analysis and mathematical modeling to predict sports outcomes.
“He just didn’t feel like there were enough resources out there to leverage all this data that exists around sports and apply it to player performance,” says Adam Kaplan, chief operating officer of numberFire. “And fast forward to now, we cover so much more than fantasy sports.”
Kaplan has been with numberFire since its inception in 2010. After the money from Millionaire ran out, the startup turned to venture capitalists for its funding. So far, they’ve raised $1.4 million in total funding. They have been cash-flow positive for the most part.
“It was a very easy sell to be like hey, let’s be smarter about the way we talk about sports. Let’s make it so every sports fan out there can get smarter insight and have more quantitative substance around their analysis,” says Kaplan.
Using millions of individual data points, numberFire startup algorithm has now successfully predicted the last three Super Bowls and the last three NCAA March Madness tournaments.
““We have consistently seen our player and team predictions outperform the competition,” Bonaddio told the New York Post in September.
numberFire claims it gives users a 30 percent advantage when it comes to winning their fantasy football leagues. Fantasy sports projections and news/sports articles are a free service, while game predictions and handicapping are behind a paywall. The company is run by a team of just eleven full-time employees, according to Zach Kempner, numberFire’s communications director. And they continue to grow — numberFire launched its first mobile app on iTunes at the end of the summer, making the platform available to an additional 150,000 users.
And while Bonaddio’s story isn’t the most conventional, Kaplan says it’s one that can teach a valuable lesson to all entrepreneurs in sports innovation.
“It’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s all about execution,” says Kaplan. “If you have a good idea, be bold about it. Have a strong backbone and be willing to fail. For us, we’ve seen that being able to think outside the box and be really motivated and driven and not give in at the first sign of trouble can really go along way. It takes a company that started in our founder’s apartment to a real company that’s doing well.”
