‘Future of baseball' startup wants to change the game for other sports
Startup profile: Diamond Kinetics
Founded by: CJ Handron, William Clark
Year founded: 2014
Headquarters: Pittsburgh, PA
Sector: Sportstech
Funding and valuation: $45.5 million raised at an undisclosed valuation, according to PitchBook
Key ecosystem partners: Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball Players Association, USA Baseball, Marucci Sports, Elysian Park Ventures, TNC Ventures, SeventySix Capital
A decade after its founding, one Pittsburgh-based startup is proving that staying local doesn't mean thinking small.
When cofounders CJ Handron and William Clark founded North Shore-based Diamond Kinetics in 2014, the concept of 'sportstech' was still in its infancy. Five years later, former Phillies player Ryan Howard called the startup 'the future of baseball. '
Fast forward to today, and the widespread use of its DK Bat Sensor to track swing data and help baseball players improve their performance is just one highlight in a portfolio of achievements. Now, Diamond Kinetics is trying to live up to that title and eyeing possible expansion into other sports.
'We started tinkering with this in a conference room at the University of Pittsburgh,' Handron told Technical.ly, 'and now it's something that has been used tens of millions of times by hundreds of thousands of people.'
Over the last decade, the company has raised over $45 million, putting that money toward evolving into a comprehensive sports technology platform. High-profile partnerships have helped it accelerate this growth even more.
Diamond Kinetics secured a partnership with Major League Baseball in 2022 as its Trusted Youth Development Platform. Through the partnership, Diamond Kinetics' tech was integrated with MLB initiatives and content, giving young players across the country a way to track their progress, compete with friends and engage in an MLB-themed digital experience.
The company has also forged partnerships with the Alliance Fastpitch, a California-based national league system for amateur fastpitch softball, and the Baltimore-based Ripken Baseball and Cooperstown-based All-Star Village to launch new in-app content to help user training.
Plus, just last year, it acquired the youth sports streaming platform SidelineHD. In addition to livestreaming games, the platform uses AI to create video highlights that can be shared by families and friends.
At the time, Handron said the acquisition aligned perfectly with the company's vision of providing a unified and complete experience for young athletes, allowing Diamond Kinetics to deliver more value to its users as they move from practice time to real games.
Throughout all of the company's growth and success, it has remained headquartered in Pittsburgh because the city has a 'perfect recipe' of talent, sports interest and a supportive, early-stage technology ecosystem, Handron said.
'This city, and its affinity for sports, and the technical capabilities coming out of both Pitt and Carnegie Mellon,' Handron said, 'gave us an opportunity to find early investors and get people who were interested in what we were doing.'
Technical.ly sat down with Handron at StudioMe in Oakland to learn more about Diamond Kinetics' origins, how it secured its major partnerships and his advice for other startups in the sportstech space.
Watch or listen to the interview below.
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