Brett Ezarsky knew from a young age that he was meant to be an entrepreneur: Walking around the mall with his father, they would discuss what marketing strategies would enhance a business and what businesses would still be operating in the next few years.
After meeting his co-founder — a Ph.D. graduate from UNCC who specializes in AI and machine learning — he found a home for an entrepreneurial pursuit of his own: ProLytics.
ProLytics brings AI-backed data to the sports industry, offering everyone from daily fantasy players to major sports corporations the opportunity to make better decisions and predictions backed by data.
While studying for her Ph.D., Ezarsky’s co-founder needed to learn a specific statistical coding language. She forced herself to practice using data from an industry she enjoyed: sports.
She started to dabble in daily fantasy sports — where online players compete by creating virtual teams of professional athletes from a given league (NBA, NFL, MLB). In playing tournaments over time, she noticed the same people were taking home tournaments’ grand prize money consistently. She learned quickly that statistical prowess sets decent players apart from consistently successful players.
By using datasets from statistical sports websites, Ezarsky’s co-founder, who requested to remain anonymous, learned to code through building algorithms to predict line-ups that gave her daily fantasy team the highest winning probability. Over the last few years, she has honed her coding skills while building algorithms that would lay the building blocks for ProLytics.
“You go through hundreds of websites describing daily fantasy sports and team [strategies], but a lot of them don’t have the data to back up their opinions,” Ezarsky said. “There’s too much information out there to spend an hour listening to what sounds like an opinion. [With ProLytics], we can show the ‘why’ behind the specific team plays we’re suggesting to our audience.”
ProLytics’ data analytics mean they can accurately predict everything from high-level game score outcomes to very specific scenarios such as the best defensive matches for your fantasy team. For daily fantasy players, this means choosing the best possible teams based on data.
For sports businesses, this means better communication to their customers and audiences backed by data-driven team forecasts. In the future, ProLytics will offer custom predictive dashboards for companies in the sports industry.
The development of ProLytics began last November, with Ezarsky’s co-founder developing and fine-tuning the algorithms while Ezarsky began marketing and laying the ground work for potential partnerships. They also hired eight interns through University of North Carolina Charlotte who learned firsthand from Ezarsky’s co-founder while developing the platform.
Currently, the ProLytics team is finalizing the development of its web application for the platform with their development partner Zoozler. The NBA will be ProLytic’s most comprehensive dataset.
“We are excited to go live with the web application,” Ezarsky said. “We are projecting to be fully ready for NBA season starting in October with our daily fantasy subscription service.”
You can contact the ProLytics team with any questions at Admin@pro-lytics.com.
The article was cowritten by Lexie Banks and David Stunja.
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