Spotlight: Gemini Sports
This edition’s Northridge TRACK member focus looks at Gemini Sports, an exciting young startup that empowers sporting directors, technical directors and other squad-planners to make data-informed decisions with greater conviction, ease and speed.
Background
Gemini was founded in 2022 by Jake Schuster, a sports scientist specialising in biomechanics who previously worked for the New Zealand All Blacks Olympic teams in 2016, Team USA, Florida State University and Loughborough University. Dissatisfied with the inaccessibility of analytics for decision-makers, Jake gathered industry colleagues from the MLB, NFL and NBA to create Gemini. Over the past two years, they have raised $7m from venture capitalists and other investors who hold stakes in a combined 27 professional sports teams!
What Gemini do
Gemini empowers professional sporting organizations to manage their squads more successfully through faster and easier workflows for greater profits. By obsessing over user experience, Gemini’s offerings reduce the dependency of decision-making executives on their data teams, allowing such engineers to stay focused on key projects rather than being burdened with application development and data architecture. The new generation of Technical Directors and squad planners seeks to be data-informed, and Gemini’s mobile application, in particular, puts key insights in their hands.
By partnering with tech giants including Snowflake Data Cloud, Databricks and Amazon Web Services, as well as sports tech vendors such as StatsBomb, SkillCorner and Impect, Gemini are able to deliver the data that teams are already subscribed to in a way that is automated, enriched and packaged in an easy-to-use platform.
Despite only recently launching their products, Gemini already has customers in the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, the University of Virginia Men’s Basketball team, Parma Calcio and Northridge client Queens Park Rangers Football Club. Their new and current focus is on British and European football, so stay tuned for more announcements.
Gemini Sports’ mobile application
Squad management, particularly talent identification, is arguably the most expensive and impactful problem in the executive management of football clubs. Assembling the right squad of players is crucial for a team's success on the field and financial performance off it. However, identifying the best talent that fits a club's unique needs, playing style and league requirements is a complex and challenging task.
Gemini Sports’ mobile application enables sporting directors and the squad planners who work for them to solve for these pain points anywhere at any time. Key insights are all packed together: playing styles, league translation, price projections, similar player comparisons, scouting reports, and much more. Data departments can take these template models and build on top of them, constantly collaborating through Gemini’s API.
Got an injury, or a phone call on transfer deadline day? The images above show how easily you can assemble and share smarter target lists and understand your squad's weaknesses and playing style needs faster than ever before, wherever you are.
To see a demo of the Gemini mobile application and put these insights in your own pocket, reach out to Jake@GeminiSports.ai.
Gemini in Europe
Earlier this year, Gemini announced a three-year partnership with QPR to provide the club with a comprehensive analytics solution which sets them on the cutting edge in European football. Gemini worked alongside Northridge, who provided contractual support on the matter.
QPR has swiftly implemented Gemini’s platform, initiating a transformative journey aimed at modernising QPR’s analytics infrastructure, fundamentally reshaping how sports data informs strategic decisions and on-field performance. Gemini contributed to QPR successfully securing their position in the EFL Championship for the 2024/25 season.
“When I arrived at QPR, I committed to building a next generation football project and that includes working with transformative technologies to improve on-pitch performance. Gemini has allowed our subject-matter experts in-house to do what they were already doing, but faster and easier,” said Christian Nourry, QPR’s CEO.
Gemini Founder and CEO Jake Schuster said, “I couldn't imagine a better organization to be our first partner in English football. Christian Nourry and Ben Williams are more than early-adopters of innovations who give great feedback and are full of helpful ideas; they are authentically committed to building for the long-term. By taking QPR's data operations from a blank sheet of paper to using cutting edge AI tech essentially overnight and actually implementing it into their key player personnel and on-field decisions, we're active participants in the reinvention of a historically significant sporting organization.”
In Q4 2024 and into 2025, Gemini will continue to add partners across Europe’s major football leagues, seeking organizations who appreciate the balance between internal building and external partnerships, and executives who value the utility of being able to narrow down and act upon key decisions faster than their rivals.
