Charlotte-based Fastbreak.ai, a sports scheduling platform, has landed the National Basketball Association as an investor and customer as part of a multi-year agreement.
Fastbreak.ai closed on a $5.2 million seed round last year, with NBA Equity — a corporate venture arm of the NBA — becoming its latest investor in the capital raise as part of their deal. The professional basketball league will also integrate Fastbreak.ai's software-as-a-service solution into its scheduling process. In addition, the technology will also assist in scheduling games for the WNBA, G League and the NBA2K League.
"League sports scheduling is one of the most complicated scheduling problems there is," said John Stewart, CEO and co-founder of Fastbreak.ai. "There are hundreds of what we call constraints or variables in that problem. And our software allows a user to define all these rules and then solve that problem and come up with the most optimal schedule with regards to fairness and competitiveness."
Fastbreak.ai was founded in 2022 by Stewart, chief product officer Chris Groer and chief technology officer Tim Carnes. Stewart co-founded MapAnything Inc., a Charlotte-based location-of-things software provider that was acquired by San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc. in 2019.
Fastbreak.ai provides research and artificial intelligence solutions for league scheduling, which can be complex when considering factors such as venue availability, balancing travel for games, schedule fairness and television viewership. The platform is built on cloud technology for speed and scale, helping leagues modernize their scheduling needs. The NBA joins the National Hockey League, Southeastern Conference (SEC), the Big East and Major League Pickleball in leveraging Fastbreak.ai's software.
"They (the NBA) trialed it for a period of time, and after trialing it and with us assisting them in this past year's schedule, they made the decision to move forward with a long-term contract with us," Stewart told CBJ.
Fastbreak.ai's seed round was led by Greycroft with participation from the Charlotte Fund and professional athletes including Greg Olsen, Larry Fitzgerald Jr., Gordon Hayward, Luke Kuechly, Whit Merrifield, Kelvin Beachum, Kurt Kitayama and Alison Lee.
The funding will be used to expand the company's headcount, Stewart said. It currently has 11 employees.
Fastbreak.ai aims to continue growing its professional and collegiate sports client base. Over the next year, it is also working to develop youth sports products, which would include solutions for scheduling and travel.
"That's going to be a big part of where we invest our time and money this year, is developing those products to bring them to market in 2025," he said.
