Texas-based nVenue has changed the in-game experience and sports betting landscape through machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company that provide real-time predictions and analytics to the game is the brainchild of Kelly Pracht. Pracht came up with the idea while watching her beloved Houston Astros for several years.
Growing up in a sports family in West Texas, Pracht has been able to combine a passion of sports with her supercomputer and tech experience that included 18 plus years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
Pracht joined SportsJam with Doug Doyle to talk about nVenue.
" As I developed this company, I spent probably more than a hundred games at Minute Maid Park building this tech and testing it. Between 2015 and 2017 you would find me developing really-advanced technologies at HPE and our go-to pastime as a family has been baseball. All of a sudden the lightbulb went off in my head. I'm watching the numbers on the screen and I like real-time stats. I wanted more. I wanted to know what do the numbers really tell me? You can't do splits on splits on splits that fast. I was solving these big tech problems, like simulating the nuclear stockpile with our customers, and we were helping the world predict large global weathers patterns. Then I thought, I want to predict what happens in baseball. So, I started tinkering with the code and got very serious about it. By 2019, we had prototypes working and running that predicted baseball situations in real-time. It all came from that need to understand data faster and better so it complements how we experience watching sports."
Pracht's nVenue is already being used by MLB and Apple, and had a pilot program at the NBA Finals and most recently a partnership with NASCAR.
Why is nVenue so desired by sports leagues? The fast-growing predicting and analytic platform breaks games down into thousands of "micro bet" moments.
"When I talk about micro-betting, I explain as something we've always done as fans. We predict what is about to happen. We talk about it. I'll bet you this is going to be a home run, I bet he gets beaned here, or the (Dallas) Cowboys are going to go three and out. That's what we do. We talk about what's about to happen. Micro-betting is nothing more than what we've been doing all along. Now we're taking it where you can do digitally, at scale, very fast socially and you can share that. We're basically just applying tech into this organic thing we do as fans already. It's everybody. It's not just sports betters, it's anybody watching the game from the avid fan to the casual fan."
After a few MLB broadcasts, Apple TV and Houston-based TV Graphics came aboard. The companies collaborated on a deal and, two weeks before the 2022 season started, nVenue got the approval to have onscreen analytics on Apple TV broadcasts.
"Gosh we learned so much from putting numbers on the screen. Our first experience was putting it on NBC in a couple of trials and we learned a lot from that. That was gut-wrenching. The first time you see your work when it's going out to millions of people, I can't even describe that feeling. Part of you is really proud and part of you is so fearful. You bounce back and forth between those two feelings. To see it on Apple, getting to millions in not just one season but two seasons was phenomenal. All those feelings and emotions just went wild in our company."
Pracht, who played high school tennis and a year of college hoops, credits her late father with giving her not only the sports background she uses, but the confidence to succeed and take risks.
"I think he'd be really proud of what I'm doing right now "
Kelly is one of just a few CEOs in the sports tech world. She also gives credit to her husband for supporting her decision to build nVenue.
You can SEE the entire SportsJam with Doug Doyle interview with Kelly Pracht here.
