An artificial intelligence company in Raleigh has expanded a deal with the National Hockey League – one that will allow anyone to sound like a hockey expert in a matter of seconds.
Pramana Labs, which allows organizations to use natural language to ask questions of its databases, has signed a multiyear extension to apply its technology to multiple NHL datasets, including data generated by NHL EDGE, the League’s Puck and Player Tracking technology.
It’s validating for CEO and co-founder Corey Patton, who hopes the green light from the NHL is just the beginning.
In an interview Patton, a former chef and sports broadcaster, walks through his entrepreneurship journey and the potential for the technology moving forward.
Patton met his co-founder and CTO, Chet Patel, at Saffron Technology. Patton was the company’s director of marketing when it was acquired by Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) in 2015. Intel charged him with exploring the sports market for potential applications of natural language processes.
“When I started shaking the trees, I said, you know, there has to be easier ways to get the answers to questions,” he said. “What if we took natural language and created the most conversational interface, so that every user across every organization could get access to their data?”
So he and Patel founded Pramana in 2018 to create what he describes as a “two-way conversation with data” for companies across multiple industries. The bootstrapped firm started small, engineer by engineer – and today has 12 employees.
Patton leveraged contacts in the sports industry that he’d met while at Intel – including the NHL.
Patton describes his career as anything but linear. Over the years the UNC-Chapel Hill grad has had several titles before settling into entrepreneurship, from a sports broadcaster with stints at CNN and Sports Illustrated to a position as a private chef for Merv Griffin. But entrepreneurship ended up checking all the boxes. Patton sees the applications of the technology – which is also used in sectors like retail and pharma – as having huge upside in sports.
The NHL is the company’s “lead customer” today, but the firm is working to build relationships with other professional sports leagues.
“We’ve met with them all,” he said. “We’re in different levels of our pipeline right now with several leagues.”
Equibase — the industry standard horse racing database — recently partnered with Pramana Labs, which uses natural language processing and proprietary database query logic to automatically generate betting tips and trends for any race on the continent. It’s all done at scale without human input – something Patton said could be replicated in other sports.
Pramana was named for the eastern philosophy term that describes ways of obtaining knowledge. The firm moved out of its office near RDU last year to go completely remote – though the long-term plan is to find another physical location.
