One of the largest Daily Fantasy Sports companies, FanDuel, has acquired sports analytics firm numberFire. This comes just weeks after securing $275 million in a Series E round.
“Our ambitions have really broadened,” FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We’ve started to think of ourselves less as a fantasy sports business — we want to make sports more exciting.”
Eccles intends to integrate numberFire into FanDuel’s fantasy sports product.
numberFire bills itself as a next generation sports analytics platform, taking the unstructured and misleading data that exists all around sports and mine it for unprecedented insight allowing highly accurate player and team performance predictions.
“Using a series of mathematical models, we break down the action in order to have a better and more accurate understanding of what teams and players are performing well and which are paper champions,” numberFire claims.
numberFire founder and CEO Nik Bonaddio will stay on board and join forces with FanDuel along with the rest of his current staff.
“I know a lot of people you talk to say that they’re pumped up, but I’m super ridiculously unbelievably pumped up,” Bonaddio said. “I couldn’t imagine a better landing place for us, where our intellectual property has the best chance to grow and prosper.”
– Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com