Sports Innovation Lab is a data, analytics, and insights leader trusted by global advertisers and sports bodies to deliver precision media targeting and optimize sponsorship strategy.
The acquisition brings together Genius Sports’ global footprint of official league data with Sports Innovation Lab’s deterministic fan graph, creating the most accurate and real-time fan activation platform in the world.
“This acquisition is an important step in the continued growth of our media business,” said Mark Locke, CEO of Genius Sports. “By integrating the most comprehensive official sports data with unmatched fan intelligence, we are strengthening our foundation and providing partners with a powerful new way to understand and engage fans at scale. The Sports Innovation Lab acquisition transforms our media business, instantly extending our reach into an established customer network across multiple verticals. It positions us to lead the market, accelerate growth, and drive a step-change expansion of our customer base.”
Josh Walker, CEO of Sports Innovation Lab, said: “Joining forces with Genius Sports represents an incredible opportunity for both our business and our team. Genius has always led the way in making sports more innovative, reshaping how technology connects fans to the games they love. We look forward to uniting our visions, scaling our platform globally, and delivering even greater value to our clients and partners.”
This combination creates the most comprehensive fan database in sports and entertainment, tracking billions of annual transactions, including purchases, attendance, and viewership. It enables brands and agencies to target fans with unmatched precision, directly connect campaigns to real behaviors and transactions, and deliver measurable ROI across every channel.
These audiences are available through Genius Sports’ FANHub platform and broadly syndicated through channel partners such as LiveRamp, The Trade Desk, and Amazon Ads. Amplified by Genius Sports’ GeniusIQ technology, marketers can leverage key moments in sport to deliver the most emotionally resonant and effective campaigns in the industry.
Redefining how advertisers connect with sports fans, this acquisition represents a pivotal step forward in the growth of Genius Sports’ business, empowering league and club partners to gain deeper insights into their fan spending patterns and ultimately unlock new sponsorship opportunities.
In the U.S. alone, brand sponsorship of major teams amounted to US$7.6 billion in 2024. Better serving this market with audience segments, premium inventory, and advanced analytics, all anchored in the most accurate, scaled, and comprehensive fan dataset in the world is critical to Genius Sports’ position at the heart of the sports media ecosystem.
Genius Sports’ acquisition follows a series of major advances in Genius Sports’ media division – from last year’s launch of FANHub to this year’s NFL extension and partnership launches with PMG, EA Sports, and Verizon.
Source: GMB
