Player’s Health, a sports medicine startup based out of COCO’s Northeast Minneapolis hub, has made quite a name for itself in the short time it’s been in Minnesota. Last week, the company earned top prize at Google Demo Day, arguably the United States’ most visible startup pitch competition. Though the award itself doesn’t have a monetary component, more than 100 Silicon Valley financiers attend Demo Day each year, and the event is widely regarded as one of the world’s best places to raise startup capital.
Case in point: according to the
Star Tribune, more than 100 Silicon Valley-based investment firms listened to this year’s 11 pitches.
Though Player’s Health hasn’t raised any funding off the award yet, there’s plenty of opportunity in the weeks ahead. AOL founder and former CEO Steve Case has pledged to personally give $100,000 to any finalist that raises $1 million within 100 days of Demo Day. Player’s Health has a head start: It’s currently in the midst of its first major fundraising push, slated to continue through the spring.
Founded by Chicago native and former pro football player Tyrre Burks, Player’s Health uses data to make youth sports safer for kids, less worrisome for parents, and less logistically challenging for coaches and school systems. The company’s signature solution is a HIPAA-compliant platform that builds and stores complete player profiles for youth sports participants.
These profiles contain a stunning breadth of information: not just personal health data, but also the type of field each kid plays on, the type of equipment used, where injuries occur and more. Over the long term, Burks hopes to tap an ever-growing body of injury data to produce targeted insights about where, how and why injuries occur. School systems and non-academic sports leagues can then use those insights to mitigate injury risk and ensure injured athletes recover properly.
“We manage not just injury, but record proper diagnosis and when patients can come back,” Burks told the Star Tribune. He saw his promising football career cut short by injury. “We need an app that collects this info to better understand the environment and how to make it safer.”
Player’s Health’s platform won’t be fully operational until June, when it begins tracking player injuries as they occur. But that hasn’t stopped Player’s Health from lining up a host of clients from Minnesota and surrounding states — including Minneapolis’ Homegrown Lacrosse, a youth lacrosse league.