Zone7 Raises $2.5 Million Seed Round to Help Professional Sports Franchises and NCAA Athletic Departments Predict Injury Risk

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 27, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Zone7 announced it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding, led by Resolute Ventures, with participation from UpWest, Amicus Capital, Dave Pell, PLG Ventures, as well as current and former professional athletes. Zone7's AI-powered platform has logged more than 5 million hours of athlete performance, and is already being used by teams in the MLB, La Liga, Champions League, MLS, collegiate athletic departments and Olympic teams.

Injuries aren't just a problem for athletes themselves, they're also incredibly costly to teams. Organizations risk losing billions in annual revenue from reduced fan attendance and/or missed playoff games. But today, using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Zone7 is turning that convention on its head and providing some of the world's most iconic sports franchises with injury prevention intelligence to prolong the careers of their players.

"Getting injured is one of the worst experiences for any athlete," said Kristaps Porzingis. "The technology behind Zone7 is extremely impressive and has the potential to change the landscape of sports forever."

Zone7's platform connects automatically to medical and athlete performance data, without requiring any new hardware or data entry for the team. The proprietary AI then creates a customized pattern recognition model for each athlete on the team to identify injury risk and enable coaches to provide training and game intervention strategies resulting in significantly reduced injury rates. Simple and actionable recommendations are sent directly to personal mobile devices so coaches, athletic trainers, and doctors can make fast, informed decisions on the field.

To date, Zone7 has achieved a 95 percent accuracy rate and 75 percent reduction.

"Injuries in professional sports cost billions annually, but in the era of big data it doesn't have to be that way," said Tal Brown, co-founder and CEO of Zone7. "Professional sports franchises have massive amounts of untapped health and performance data that, when unlocked by AI, can become one of a team's most valuable assets. By better understanding every athlete's breaking points and implementing personalized intervention plans to prevent injuries before they occur, teams no longer have to accept injuries as an inevitability."

Zone7's achieved early traction in the world of professional soccer, where teams competing in La Liga, the Champions League, MLS and NCAA report a 75 percent reduction in injury rates on average. Other sports have quickly followed suit, as Zone7 was recently invited to demonstrate its technology at the Baseball Operations Technology Expo at the MLB Winter Meetings in Las Vegas and currently has pilot programs running with a number of MLB franchises.

The company was co-founded by CEO Tal Brown and CTO Eyal Eliakim, both of whom served with the Israeli Defense Forces elite intelligence unit 8200 (equivalent to the National Security Agency). Brown has nearly two decades of experience in product management, sales and AI. Prior to Zone7, he was one of the founders of Salesforce's first AI team and shipped Einstein, Salesforce's first AI product used by millions of sales professionals. Eliakim is an AI expert and published sports science researcher. He was previously a data scientist at Salesforce and also worked as Head of Sports Science and Performance Analysis with several professional soccer franchises.

"Professional sports is, for the most part, slow to embrace medical and performance data, and as such, this has historically been a difficult target market to break into. Tal and Eyal have built a compelling product that is making teams stand up and take notice. It's literally a game changer," said Raanan Bar-Cohen, general partner at Resolute Ventures. "The fact that Zone7 is the first company to show injuries can be avoided by using artificial intelligence, makes us extremely excited to partner with the Zone7 team."

About Zone7
Zone7 enables athletes, coaches and medical professionals to leverage analytics and empower health and performance decisions leading to injury prevention. We use AI-driven pattern recognition to identify injury risk  and simulate how changes in training and working impact performance and injuries. Data is collected from wearables, medical profiles and physio & screening products to ensure the utmost accuracy and trust. For more information, visit zone7.ai

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SOURCE Zone7

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