Genius Sports Limited (‘Genius’) provides B2B scalable, technology-led products and services to the sports, sports betting and sports media industries.
Genius offers proprietary technology, such as Second Spectrum, FanHub, and Spirable, to complement its existing core business. Second Spectrum is an optical tracking solution that uses computer vision and machine learning to generate performance data, analytics, insights, and visualization solutions for major sports leagues, such as the NFL, Nat...
Genius Sports Limited (‘Genius’) provides B2B scalable, technology-led products and services to the sports, sports betting and sports media industries.
Genius offers proprietary technology, such as Second Spectrum, FanHub, and Spirable, to complement its existing core business. Second Spectrum is an optical tracking solution that uses computer vision and machine learning to generate performance data, analytics, insights, and visualization solutions for major sports leagues, such as the NFL, National Basketball Association (the ‘NBA’), English Premier League (the ‘EPL’), and National Collegiate Athletic Association (the ‘NCAA’). FanHub and Spirable provide Genius with additional capabilities that complement Genius’ Media and Fan Engagement Platform. FanHub is a market leader in free-to-play games, such as fantasy, trivia, and contests, which allow sports leagues, media companies, and sportsbooks to engage casual sports fans. Spirable is an automated content creation platform that uses live sports data and audience data to create, distribute, and optimize personalized video at scale.
Genius is a fast-growing business with significant scale, distribution, and an expanding addressable market and opportunity.
The company creates engaging and immersive fan experiences, performance analysis tools, and officiating solutions, while simultaneously providing sports leagues with reliable and sustainable revenue streams.
Genius sits at the heart of the global sports betting ecosystem, where the company has deep, critical relationships with over 400 sports leagues and federations, over 650 sportsbook brands, and over 170 marketing customers (which includes some of the aforementioned sportsbook brands). The following are examples of services Genius provides its partners globally:
Sports Leagues: Genius provides the technology infrastructure for the collection, integration, and distribution of live data that is essential both to running a league’s operations and growing their profile and revenue streams. Genius also works alongside leagues to protect the integrity of their competitions from the threat of match-fixing through global bet monitoring technology, online and offline education services, and consultancy services, including integrity audits and investigations.
Sportsbooks: Genius’ technology, content, and services allow sportsbook operators to outsource selected core, but resource-heavy, functions necessary to run their business. This includes the collection of live sports data, oddsmaking, risk management, and player marketing, as well as BetVision, an integrated watch-and-bet sportsbook experience contained within a single screen.
Sports Content Owners: Genius partners with leagues, broadcasters, and other content owners to supply alternative broadcast feeds, integrating optical tracking data and graphic overlays in real-time to augment live footage with statistical insights and visual content, such as shot probabilities, running speeds, and more.
Brands: Genius engages with a range of brands and agencies, both from the gaming and non-gaming sectors, to provide a range of online marketing and fan engagement tools that drive customer acquisition and retention.
Genius is a sports innovation company that enables consumer-facing businesses, such as sports leagues, sportsbook operators, brands, and media companies, to engage with their customers. The scope of Genius’ technology bridges the entire sports data journey, from intuitive applications and computer vision systems that enable accurate real-time data capture, to the creation and provision of in-game betting odds and digital content that help Genius’ customers create engaging experiences for the ultimate end-user, who are primarily sports fans.
Genius’ live data services, alongside other value-add solutions, are deeply integrated into nearly all regulated sportsbook operators, comprising over 650 sportsbook brands worldwide. None of these sportsbooks take Genius’ entire product offering, and so these integrations provide a clear runway for future growth. Genius provides customized solutions depending on its customers’ requirements, ranging from supplying live data feeds, in-game oddsmaking, and risk management, to managing a sportsbook’s entire back-end operation. Genius customers include global sportsbook brands, such as bet365, DraftKings, Flutter (including FanDuel), Entain, and Fanatics, as well as leading B2B gaming technology platform providers, such as OpenBet and Kambi.
In order to supply sportsbooks with a sufficient volume of sports data, Genius has built a broad portfolio that covers over 300,000 events, and over 145,000 events under official data and/or streaming rights agreements (of which approximately 115,000 are exclusive). This includes official data and trading for leagues, such as the EPL and the NFL, as well as many other competitions that are popular with bettors globally.
Genius has established long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with sports leagues and federations and has acquired the rights to collect and monetize their data. Genius utilizes a network of more than 7,500 highly trained statisticians across over 140 countries who work on the ground, pitch-side, and courtside, to capture data in real-time using Genius software.
In exchange for these sports data rights, for the majority of Genius’ league partners, the company provides vital technology infrastructure solutions, including competition management software, scoreboard technology, athlete registration, data collection and distribution, fan-facing websites, officiating, fan engagement tools, performance data tracking solutions, and coaching analysis tools. The integration of sports leagues and robust human infrastructure gives Genius a highly diversified rights portfolio and deep competitive position.
Genius’ technology and services extend beyond the symbiotic sports data—sports betting relationship.
In the fan engagement space, Genius provides a wide range of technology and services to both betting and non-betting businesses. The company provides data-driven digital marketing services to a range of advertisers wanting to target sports audiences, helping them optimize brand awareness and customer acquisition and retention campaigns. Genius’ ability to combine multiple data sets, including real-time statistics, betting odds, behavioral data, and engagement data, to enhance its digital marketing solutions further deepens its relationships with its customer base.
Genius harnesses its AI-powered optical tracking technology to augment sports broadcasts in real-time, providing rightsholders and broadcasters the ability to engage fans with new viewing experiences. This includes enhanced broadcasts featuring real-time visual insights, as well as fully alternative broadcasts, creating a parallel broadcast aimed at specific cohorts of sports fans. These unique broadcast experiences empower leagues to offer greater levels of fan engagement while simultaneously unlocking new potential revenue streams through sponsor activation. The company also provides sportsbooks, leagues, teams, and brands with digital engagement tools, primarily in the form of gamification, to help capture monetizable audience data, activate sponsorships, and strengthen long-term engagement.
For sports teams and leagues, Genius' AI-powered optical tracking technology and advanced machine learning capabilities enable a whole variety of solutions designed to improve performance on and off the pitch or court.
Genius’ existing portfolio of official data includes some of the most valuable sports rights, including to the National Football League (the "NFL"), English Premier League (the "EPL"), National Collegiate Athletic Association (the "NCAA"), and the International Basketball Federation ("FIBA").
Genius classifies sports and the associated rights as Tiers 1 through 4. Sports rights classified as Tier 1 are those from leagues with global name recognition, typically acquired through a wide-scale strategic partnership spanning multiple touchpoints of Genius' products and technology. Tier 1 rights will frequently have rights fees associated with them as well. Sports rights that are not classified as Tier 1 are typically from regional leagues. These non-Tier 1 rights are typically acquired by Genius through a ‘contra’ model in which Genius secures long-term agreements with the respective leagues in exchange for Genius’ technology and software solutions (and occasionally de minimis cash fees). This allows the company to develop mutually beneficial partnerships with leagues globally and integrate Genius’ technology and services into each league’s operations. It is notable that while non-Tier 1 sports are typically smaller leagues that are less popular at a global level, they are very popular in their local countries or regions and often have large, dedicated fan bases.
The company started its expansion into the provision of audio-visual (‘A/V’) rights and services in the second half of 2019. This includes providing sports leagues with proprietary AI-powered A/V production services to capture live game streams with minimal human intervention. These streams, which can be integrated via the BetVision Platform and overlaid with enhanced augmented functionality, are a valuable addition to Genius’ portfolio of sports betting services as a complimentary offering to in-game data and odds services. The company has over 50,000 streaming rights under official rights.
The Genius Growth Strategy
The company’s strategies are capitalizing on the continued growth of global sports betting and achieving a fair value for live official data; development of new technology and services for sports, sportsbooks, advertisers, and broadcasters; accelerating the growth of sports advertising and fan engagement solutions; developing high-ROI strategic partnerships around sports data and video rights; and strategic acquisitions and investments.
Products and Business Model
Genius provides critical technology and services required to power the global ecosystem connecting sports, betting, and media. Genius’ services are organized into three key product areas: Sports Technology and Services; Betting Technology, Content and Services; and Media Technology, Content and Services.
All of Genius’ products are powered by proprietary technology and robust data infrastructure.
Sports Technology and Services
Genius builds and supplies technology and services that allow sports leagues to analyze and monetize their data and video following its collection. The company offers a broad range of data capture technologies, ranging from applications designed for manual data input to fully automated data collection enabled by computer vision.
For manual capture, Genius has trained statisticians globally who are highly skilled in collecting accurate, real-time data during events and matches. The data can then be repackaged and analyzed almost instantaneously and can then be used to help leagues and teams analyze real-time statistics, develop coaching tools, and support broadcast partners. It is this same data that Genius also uses to power its Betting Content and Services.
Through the company’s optical tracking system, Dragon, Genius harnesses computer vision, machine learning, and AI to simultaneously monitor and compute every play within a sports game to capture billions of high-fidelity data points in real-time. Genius' data and AI platform, GeniusIQ, also enables the creation of ‘mesh’ tracking data. Mesh tracking data captures highly detailed data points for the entire surface areas of every player and ball. This facilitates the creation of ultra-rich 3D environments, which in turn powers advanced performance analysis tools for sports teams and automated officiating technology for leagues.
Genius' suite of performance analysis tools is used by every NBA team and the majority of EPL teams. This software automatically synchronizes event data, tracking data, and multi-angle video to give coaches faster, high-dimension video analysis and more efficient workflows.
In 2024, the company’s GeniusIQ-powered Semi-Automated Offside Technology (‘SAOT’) was selected by the EPL as its chosen technology provider for officiating offside decisions. The system is built on the key principles of speed and precision to minimize breaks in the game and deliver accuracy for a better fan experience. The technology is also available for soccer leagues globally.
A recent example is the ‘Madden NFL Cast’, a collaboration between NBC Sports, Peacock, the NFL, EA SPORTS, and Genius, to create an immersive, data-powered live football experience using Madden NFL’s unique brand elements as animated overlays.
Genius also develops additional tools that help sports leagues deepen fan engagement. These include automated creation of fan-facing websites, social media content, and statistical content, such as team and player standings that are updated in real-time.
Genius’ streaming solution provides the technology, automatic production, and distribution needed by sports to commercialize video footage of their games. This is particularly useful for non-Tier 1 sports leagues that lack the capabilities or resources to develop their own live streaming solutions.
Genius also provides end-to-end Integrity Services to sports leagues and is the trusted integrity partner for over 140 sports leagues worldwide.
Betting Technology, Content and Services
Genius supplies the technology, content, and services that power global sportsbooks. Sportsbooks can outsource as much or as little of these capabilities as necessary depending on their requirements. Genius’ offering includes:
Live sports data: Fast and reliable feeds of live match data, the majority of which are delivered directly from stadiums around the world in under a second using Genius technology. These real-time data points allow sportsbooks to create odds for in-game betting markets on over 300,000 events per year.
Pre-game and in-game odds feeds: A combination of automated oddsmaking powered by unique mathematic algorithms, a specialist trading team of over 250 people, and robust technology enables Genius to manage the full sports betting lifecycle on behalf of its sportsbook customers. This includes creating events, setting odds, and managing them in real-time as the game unfolds, and settling betting markets so that sportsbooks can update their users’ accounts. Configuration by the customer within Genius’ backend system enables sportsbooks to create a bespoke experience for their user base.
BetVision: Genius has also launched a first-of-its-kind immersive live streaming solution in partnership with the NFL called BetVision, an interactive single-screen live streaming product that includes an integrated bet slip, real-time team and player statistics, and personalized, augmented viewing modes.
Risk management services: Genius offers real-time management of all sportsbook liabilities, including customer profiling, monitoring of incoming bets, automated acceptance and rejection of bets, and limit setting. Risk management is a vital part of a sportsbook’s operation because it protects its profitability.
Live streaming: Thousands of official live streams, which are acquired via Genius’ official partnerships with Tier 2 through 4 sports leagues, many of which are captured at courtside and pitch-side around the world using Genius technology. This service is designed to boost betting appeal and drive sportsbook handle at off-peak times, in a cost-efficient manner when compared to Tier 1 streaming content.
These services are provided to sportsbooks under long-term contracts. In each of these contracts, the sportsbook makes a commitment to Genius regarding what services and/or what sports events they will use Genius’ products and services for. The business model is either revenue share, where Genius receives a share of customer net gaming revenue or GGR, or a usage-based license fee model.
Media Technology, Content and Services
Genius builds and supplies technology that helps brands reach, engage, and monetize sports fans in a highly cost-effective manner. These partners include sportsbooks, online and brick-and-mortar gaming operators, sports leagues, and other non-gaming brands that target sports fans. The combination of sports audience data and the tools for brands to grow their own database of fans, along with engaging campaign creative and content, help marketing teams effectively and efficiently target sports audiences.
Through the company’s proprietary advertising platform, FanHub, Genius provides services, such as the creation, delivery, and optimization of digital marketing campaigns, including data-driven personalized ad creative and programmatic media buying. Offered as a fully-managed or self-service solution, FanHub is an advertising solution built specifically with sports audiences in mind. Through the platform, marketing teams can access exclusive audiences of sports fans and premium digital sports inventory in order to accurately and efficiently target fans. The platform's omni-channel media buying capability executes campaigns across social and programmatic channels, including Display, Video, CTV, Audio, and DOOH. FanHub also offers a full dynamic creative optimization product that integrates play-by-play data and fan preferences for real-time campaign relevance and personalization.
For brands and media, Genius also offers a range of digital content and gamification solutions. A range of free-to-play games, quizzes, and polls help these customers engage sports fans while simultaneously capturing valuable audience data, which in turn enables more personalized marketing strategies. Genius develops fan engagement widgets for digital publishers, featuring live game statistics and betting-related content that drive traffic to sportsbooks. This helps unlock alternative revenue streams for digital content developers and sports betting affiliate programs.
Representative Customers and Partnerships
Whether they are sports organizations or sportsbooks, Genius enjoys deep and long-term relationships with its customers rooted in the provision of mission-critical technology, live data, or services that are fundamental to its partners’ success.
Genius has relationships with over 650 sportsbook brand customers, including:
Global sportsbooks, such as FanDuel, Betfair, Paddy Power, Sisal, Sportsbet, and Sky Bet (all Flutter); BetMGM, Ladbrokes, Coral, Bwin, and SuperSport (all Entain); DraftKings, Fanatics, Bet365, 888/William Hill (both Evoke), Betsson, Betway; and
Leading B2B platform providers, such as OpenBet, Playtech, Altenar, Pragmatic Play, and Kambi.
Genius has over 400 sports league partners, including:
Globally recognized leagues, such as the NFL, EPL, NBA, NCAA, FIBA, FIFA, the Professional Golfers' Association of America (‘PGA’) Tour, and Ryder Cup; and
Numerous other regional and lower-tier league divisions across various sports, such as basketball, soccer, ice hockey, and volleyball.
Genius has over 170 media and advertising customers, including:
Recognized leading US gaming brands, such as FanDuel, DraftKings, BetFanatics, BetMGM, Caesars, and ESPN Bet;
A wide range of sports betting and iGaming brands in Europe and Africa, including Bet365, PlayOjo, and SuperBet;
A wide range of brands globally, including Diageo, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Heineken, Bayer, Stellantis (Jeep/Dodge), LVMH, and Buffalo Wild Wings, that Genius helps engage and monetize sports fans through its dynamic creative, media buying, or digital engagement tools;
Major global media publishers, such as ESPN, CBS, Premier League Productions, TNT Sports, NBA League Pass, NFL+, and TSN, to which Genius helps drive fan engagement through AI-powered video augmentation; and
Sports properties, including the NFL and NFL Teams, including the LA Rams, and Major League Baseball teams, including the LA Dodgers, the Houston Astros, and the San Diego Padres, that Genius helps target fans through its fan engagement and digital advertising solutions.
Genius Technology
Fail-safe data and video capture
Genius’ in-venue data collection systems are designed to continue to function when disconnected from supporting systems, ensuring statisticians can continue to collect undisrupted, rich sports data. While connected, data is synchronized with Genius’ data distribution network, ensuring low latency, accurate, reliable delivery of play-by-play data.
Automated monitoring, remote management, and AI-driven production mean minimal interaction is required from sports leagues once the solution has been installed, which, alongside Genius’ innovative hardware solutions, reduces production costs. Genius captures live video for broadcast and high-fidelity tracking data, suitable for building a semantic understanding of the game.
The company’s in-venue data collection and live stream production capabilities are further complemented by Scorebots that physically integrate with scoreboards in thousands of venues worldwide. This integrates core data directly from the officials and delivers it to in-venue consumers and the Genius data distribution network in real-time.
Highly scalable real-time sportsbook content
To support the vast volume of sports events and live data provided to sportsbooks, Genius hosts in-memory controllers that allow independent management of every in-game fixture for each customer. This architecture provides a very low latency service, is horizontally scalable, and implements a failover software design over redundant hardware to ensure uninterrupted service.
Sportsbook customers can take control of their own event at any time and adjust their margins, offering, or position within the market through the online portal; however, Genius’ proprietary back-office trading systems ensure that skilled operators can cost-effectively manage all fixtures for Genius’ customers with significant economies of scale.
The company’s proprietary risk and liability management services leverage its sophisticated algorithmic models to improve the margins of its sportsbook customers, providing personalized, responsive pricing, bet acceptance, and minimal bet delays.
Robust and Reliable distribution
Genius’ data distribution platforms are integrated directly into B2B customers’ servers through both standard application programming interfaces and services that can be easily customized to integrate with the back-office systems commonly used by sportsbooks.
The streaming network supports B2B and B2C delivery of both in-play and on-demand streams at scale. The Genius Drop and Play media player enables rapid B2C integration, allowing customers to deliver Genius Live content alongside other content for a fixture by simply inserting an HTML tag in their websites.
Targeted fan engagement
With visual components that are embedded directly in league, sportsbook, and media websites and mobile applications, Genius is able to uniquely understand the interests of sports fans and deliver relevant, engaging content.
Genius’ suite of free-to-play games includes fantasy sports, trivia, bracket challenges, pick ‘em, and polling games. These games further enhance the ability to significantly increase fan engagement, customer retention, and social activation for the sports leagues and federations, sportsbooks, media companies, and broadcasters that it works with worldwide.
Genius’ next-generation augmented streams, powered by machine learning, provide fans with new ways to consume streaming content. This capability can be entirely customized for different audiences, brands, and use cases and can be delivered at low latencies suitable for sports betting audiences.
Programmatic Advertising
Genius operates sophisticated in-house advertising technology, including a large-scale data warehouse, proprietary audience tracking software, and a self-service programmatic technology platform. This allows the company to efficiently direct advertising budgets to sports-facing inventory and audiences, maximizing the ROI for advertising dollars spent.
Through big data analytics of data generated from this unique understanding of fans, live sports events, and the sportsbook market, Genius is able to offer large-scale targeted advertising campaigns that are delivered through cost-effective, data-driven, real-time bidding for publishing space. The advertising content selected for each fan by Genius’ proprietary advertising technology further leverages the company’s data and visualization capabilities. These capabilities have been further enhanced through the acquisition and integration of Spirable, which enables advertisers to automatically and effectively deliver targeted dynamic content driven by data, video, and AI across all media channels.
Advanced capabilities
Genius’ Second Spectrum division has built world-leading AI and computer vision technology that can track, understand, and analyze detailed gameplay in real-time. The Second Spectrum Dragon system combines multiple, low-cost, in-venue cameras with proprietary computer vision technology to generate highly accurate 3D player pose data, which is analyzed by AI systems that have been developed with a deep understanding of sports to provide coaching insights, support for complex officiating decisions, and rich data sets, all in real-time.
The company’s award-winning capabilities are driving a revolution in sports data and analytics, coaching, officiating, and visual augmentation of live streams and broadcasts. The augmentation capabilities have been showcased for the EPL, NBA, and NFL, with broadcast partners, including BT Sport, Amazon Prime, and CBS.
Research and Development
Genius’ research and development expenses were $24.6 million for the year ended December 31, 2024.
Sales and Marketing
The Genius marketing approach is driven by the strength and innovation of the company’s product offerings. The company employs a land-and-expand strategy that is centered around the superior and high reliability of its products coupled with an intense focus on delivering and addressing customers’ existing needs, as well as anticipating potential future opportunities for additional services. Once Genius’ technology is integrated into the customers’ information technology infrastructure, it becomes a critical part of their operations and is difficult to replace without risk of disruption.
Genius also has exclusive agreements with several of its league partners, which means sportsbooks that want to offer these events will need to source the data from Genius.
The majority of new business in the sports and betting industries is acquired through direct sales efforts and referrals.
Genius has robust global sales and account management teams with more than 180 commercial professionals who are organized by region and industry. This team is responsible for new business development and promoting value-add services to grow existing partnership value.
In addition, Genius also has a 14-person marketing team that promotes its services and drives inbound leads through a combination of attending, exhibiting, and sponsoring conferences and trade shows (which has historically been the main focus of marketing resources), editorial content, direct email marketing, social media, and paid media partnerships.
Competition
The company considers its most direct and relevant competitors to be Sportradar, IMGArena, and Stats Perform.
Outside of the sports and betting space, there are other companies Genius competes with. This includes Hawkeye, which supplies optical tracking systems to create performance analysis and officiating tools for sports leagues.
Genius’ Media business competes with a broad spectrum of businesses that offer various fan engagement and advertising services. These businesses range from suppliers of gamification tools and digital sports content to generalist media buying agencies, such as The Trade Desk.
Seasonality
The global sporting calendar is year-round, and the company’s products cover the entire sporting calendar. In addition, the relative importance of different sporting events varies in the broad range of territories where its customers operate (e.g., European sportsbooks will place more importance on European sports events, and US sportsbooks will place more importance on the US sports events). The company’s revenues are typically impacted by the NFL and European football season calendars.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned nine registered trademarks and 31 registered patents in the US, and 65 registered trademarks and four registered patents in various non-US jurisdictions, along with a further five unregistered trademarks. As of December 31, 2024, the company owned 211 domain names.
The company uses Open Source Software in its services and periodically reviews its use of Open Source Software to attempt to avoid subjecting its services and product offerings to conditions it does not intend.
Government Regulations
The data privacy and collection laws and regulations that affect the company’s business include, but are not limited to: the General Data Protection Regulation, the ePrivacy Directive, the EU AI Act, and implementing national legislation and any data laws and regulations enacted in the UK, including the UK GDPR; US federal, state, and local data protection laws, such as the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 (the ‘FTCA’) and Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and similar state laws, state data breach laws, and state privacy laws, such as the CCPA, the California Consumer Privacy Rights Act, and the Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Act of New York; Swiss data protection laws, such as the Swiss Ordinance to the Federal Act on Data Protection and the guidance of the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner; the Data Protection Law of Colombia and the directives of the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce of Colombia; and other international data protection, data localization, and state laws impacting data privacy and collection.
Other regulations that affect the company’s business include: US state laws and certain European jurisdictions regulating sports betting and online gaming and related licensing requirements; laws regulating the advertising and marketing of sports betting, including, but not limited to, the UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Direct Marketing, and Sales Promotion administered by the Committee of Advertising Practice and the FTCA; anti-bribery and anti-corruption regulations, and corporate regulations, including the FCPA and the UK Bribery Act; laws and regulations relating to insider trading, antitrust, competition, anti-money laundering, OFAC, intellectual property, consumer protection, accessibility claims, securities, tax, labor and employment, commercial disputes, health and safety, services, and other matters; other international, domestic federal, and state laws impacting marketing and advertising, including, but not limited to, laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, state telemarketing laws and regulations, and state unfair or deceptive practices acts; and laws related to corporate sustainability, climate disclosures, and social responsibility.
History
The company was founded in 2001. The company was formerly known as Genius Sports Group Limited and changed its name to Genius Sports Limited in April 2021.
