The KAEO Startups series features young entrepreneurs and the businesses they are creating in the sports industry. Click the logo for a list of all startups featured.

Published: April 2012

KAEO The Details:
Name: numberFire Inc.
Founded: 2010
Founders: Nik Bonaddio, Sean Weinstock, Keith Goldner
Concept: A fantasy sports analytics platform
Website: www.numberFire.com
Twitter: @numberFire
Email: Email numberFire

 
For most people, playing fantasy football is a way to have some fun with friends and spice up the NFL season. For more serious leagues, hours of analysis go into planning the draft and setting the weekly lineups. Statistics and predictions mean everything, which is why websites such as ESPN and Yahoo! have editorial staffs dedicated strictly to fantasy sports.

 
For Steelers fan Nik Bonaddio, the statistics and predictions he was finding online weren’t good enough. Nik felt the projections were often based on opinion, rather than statistical evidence. Nik insisted that “Wall Street doesn’t work that way,” referring to the gut-based decisions for statistical predictions rather than fact-based projections, and neither should fantasy sports.

 
Based on success in his own fantasy football league and his Wall Street background, Nik launched numberFire, a fantasy sports analytics platform. numberFire uses an algorithm based on similar scenarios to determine the future success of any player at any position. For example, if Aaron Rodgers is playing the 49ers in San Francisco, numberFire will calculated a projection for Rodgers based on his own statistics throughout the season, past performances against defenses similar to that of the 49ers, and other performance factors such as weather, time of day, and stadium. numberFire uses data mining and cloud computing as the basis for the algorithms.

 
Nik developed the algorithm while playing fantasy football with a group of college friends.

 
Discussions about numberFire began between Nik and his current partners Sean Weinstock and Keith Goldner after the 2010 fantasy football season. Since then, they have focused on fantasy football but also recently completely a March Madness predictions tournament. numberFire has active partnerships with ESPN, SBNation, and Sports Illustrated; all of whom need as much analytics as possible.

 
numberFire first got its break when it was selected to present at a TechCrunch conference. They have now been live full-time for about ten months but active for about two years. For now, their main focuses are on fantasy football and building a one-stop shop for analytic data. Their plan is to expand into other sports in the coming years as well as launch an ad platform next year.

 
For more information, visit www.numberFire.com.