Luke Zaientz surveyed the youth sports platform landscape.
His takeaway? The major players face myriad structural challenges that hinder innovation — mergers, the distractions that come with trying to be acquired, shifting priorities after taking on private equity investment, a limited embrace of artificial intelligence.
The conclusion sparked a question for the Reigning Champs co-founder (NCSA College Recruiting, RCX Sports) and former IMG Academy CSO: “If we just focused on a platform that really focused on innovation, what would we want to do something awesome, to give back to athletes, admins, clubs, coaches?”
Enter Otto Sport AI. The platform launched today following a $16.5M seed round co-led by Mamba Growth Equity and Rally Ventures.
“We’re different because we’re focused on the ecosystem,” said Zaientz, who is Otto’s CEO. “We’re different because we’re trying to go much deeper, because we’re using AI to drive really practical, impactful tools and results for our different constituent groups.”
Serves lacrosse, soccer and volleyball at launch
No current plans to expand beyond those sports
Focus on reaching all constituents and needs — tournaments, ticketing, registration, clubs, athletes, families, governing bodies, college recruiters, etc.
An AI chat assistant that reduces administrative workload
Could potentially expand into financial compliance, other areas in future
“If you can go deeper from an ecosystem perspective, you can then glean data that then powers AI to do really awesome stuff,” Zaientz said. “That’s where we are focused. How do you connect an ecosystem so that you have really interesting data, and then experiment with different types of AI tools.”
An example: The platform’s AI can be used by a volleyball tournament organizer to analyze the floor plan inside a convention center on how to best lay out courts.
Other tools include automated scoring, protections blocking disruptive fans from entering events, player profiles, tracking college coach attendance, schedule optimization and Otto Pilot, the admin-focused chatbot.
Otto Pilot — which will also be available as a standalone product — fields and handles FAQs from parents and other stakeholders. It also directs more sophisticated inquiries to officials and is expected to eventually streamline administrative tasks that currently require toggling between tools.
Zaientz said a user should be able to pull up the chatbot on a rainy day and instruct it to postpone practice, book a field for the next day, inform all families of the change and update the schedule.
“A cultural anchor for us is empathy at scale,” he said. “Do you spend a lot of time thinking about the needs of your users, what would be useful to them, putting yourself in their shoes. When you can focus on innovation and empathy at the same time, we think really great things come out of that for our users.”
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