When Austin entrepreneur Brian Cruver sees inefficiencies, he smiles so wide you can almost hear it on a phone call.
He had that experience after he found himself helping his son through the process of being evaluated as a Division I quarterback recruit.
“You've got 28,000 college athletics programs searching amongst millions of athletes across all these different sports, so there's no standard process. It's extremely inefficient,” he said. “There's no transparency, and there's a lot of dishonesty.”
After exiting his most recent startup, AlertMedia, in a reportedly $400 million deal with Austin private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, Cruver said he got excited about fixing what he saw as broken in college athletics recruiting.
Ultimately, his son sided with Florida Atlantic University. Meanwhile, Cruver started collaborating with longtime fellow founder Brett Andrew, who was going through a similar headache with his daughter, a highly sought after beach volleyball prospect who ended up siding with Florida State University. The process was also frustrating for them.
"We just got to realize that we've both spent the last four years dealing with the nightmare that is college recruiting," he said. "So without even really knowing it, we've been developing an expertise around this industry over the last four years, and it is completely broken."
So, Cruver said he has “put the band back together,” by teaming up once again with Andrew, AlertMedia’s former CRO, who he has known since their days in college together at the University of Southern California. He added several other former AlertMedia leaders to the foundation, and the new venture also brought Cruver back together with the Austin venture firms that helped propel AlertMedia to its exit.
The new startup, Scorability, emerged from stealth Oct. 16. Scorability wants its platform to become the go-to place where coaches and recruiters from some 28,000 college sports programs easily sort through the data of, and connect with, millions of young athletes pursuing a sports scholarship. The company’s forthcoming products will help coaches get more trustworthy data that reduces their need to constantly travel to visit and observe hundreds of potential recruits.
The new startup has raised $11 million in seed funding. The bulk of it came from local firms Next Coast Ventures and Silverton Partners, which led AlertMedia’s series B and A, respectively. Scorability’s co-founders also invested in the round. Next Coast co-founder Tom Ball, along with Silverton Partners’ Morgan Flager, are joining Scorability’s board as part of the deal.
“The world of college recruiting is broken, and the stakes are high. The timing is right to introduce Scorability’s new approach and solve the myriad of problems these coaches and programs are facing,” Ball stated.
It's Cruver’s response to what he saw as disingenuous invites to camps and programs that couldn’t follow through on their pitches.
Down the line, Cruver and his co-founders see a series of product rollouts that help standardize and simplify the process of connecting young athletes with the colleges where they’ll be the best fit based on trusted data and processes.
"I would hope to have three different products serving the coaches, the college coaches, the youth coaches, and then the individual athletes to fold out to build by the end of 2024," he said.
The company is still small, but it expects to grow from a handful to a group of about 30 by the end of the year.
Half of that will be engineers with an eye for data analytics, and the rest will be go-to-market team members who connect it beyond its existing group of schools testing its base product in beta.
The company, currently mostly working remotely, is about to sublease space from AlertMedia, which still has space off of MoPac south of the river, even though its HQ is now downtown at the new RiverSouth complex. Cruver remains executive chairman of AlertMedia
Cruver said the company’s initial focus is on bringing the best recruiting data available to coaches. That’s who will initially pay for the company’s service. But he sees it expanding deeper partnerships with coaches, trainers, events and other places where young athletes are showcasing their capabilities.
One of the company's pitchdeck slides says college athletes and their parents "lack of resources and/or paying handlers (being misled) and other services promising recruitment."
Cruver said his new company will combine traditional athletic metrics from box scores and other sources, with standardized and automated data collection, including partnerships with sporting programs that meet their criteria.
"There's literally millions of young kids and families who dream of playing college sports and are being put through the wringer," Cruver said. "So there's a lot to fix. And we're excited to get working on it."
