Sportradar, through its brand Betradar, noticed an early opportunity and has entered into a partnership with esports big data startup DOJO Madness in order to become first-to-market in offering bookmakers a suite of tools to provide live-odds across online and offline esports competitions.

The exclusive partnership has an initial term of eight years and includes multiple millions of dollars in guaranteed base payments from Betradar to DOJO Madness. The deal will extend automatically unless either side exercises an opt-out clause during the initial term. It also includes a revenue participation component, which will entitle DOJO Madness to a commission based on retainers received by Betradar from third party bookmakers for the esport services that Betradar contemplates providing.

At least some form of revenue share is guaranteed, as Betradar already has customers signed up when the esports product goes live, which DOJO Madness CEO Jens Hilgers says will be in a couple of weeks. Betradar is expected to tap into its existing network of partners, which includes over 450 bookmakers in more than eighty countries.

“Betradar doesn’t want to miss the esports portal,” says Hilgers. “We bumped into Betradar and realized that Betradar had trouble to create the algorithms to predict the outcome of esports matches. Betradar found that we had actually done that already.”

But DOJO Madness entered into the business of providing esports data as a matter of chance. Its main focus has been providing coaching esports apps for players and teams. According to Hilgers, the DOJO Madness team would spend some time during evenings to create real-time predictions for esports games simply as an enjoyable activity. The result is the formulation of a new division that has led to rapid growth for DOJO Madness and the employment of roughly twelve data scientists in Berlin that are focused entirely on esports.

“Esports games are much more complex than traditional sports. The strategic depths are significantly higher,” explains Hilgers. “Modeling that out with people who have never played esports games is complex. You need to aggregate a lot of data in various ways.”

Negotiations between DOJO Madness and Betradar were also quite complex. It took six months for the parties to go from having talks to executing a contract. Now, DOJO Madness will provide Betradar with pre-match and in-play odds for all of the popular esports games, including CS:GO, Dota 2, League of Legends and Overwatch.

“We were always clear that esports live betting provided a great opportunity to invigorate the market, but we weren’t prepared to rush in at the cost of our, and our clients’, reputation,” says James Watson, Betradar’s Head of Esports. “We’re delighted to have been able to partner with industry-experts DOJO to create a best-in-class approach, further enhancing the exclusive fast content from our partnership with ESL – we have really created a new and unique framework that will greatly benefit operators.”

Betradar’s parent company Sportradar received $44 million in a funding round in 2015, which was led by Revolution Growth with involvement by Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Washington Wizards owner Ted Leonsis is a co-founder of Revolution Growth.

Earlier this year, DOJO Madness raised a $4.5 million Series A round of funding led by March Capital Partners. At the time, DOJO Madness was still mainly focused on providing esports coaching, but Hilgers already recognized that the data he was collecting could lead to other opportunities. It has, in the form of millions of dollars guaranteed and the ability to earn much more through a revenue share platform with Betradar.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/darrenheitner/2016/11/17/multi-million-dollar-big-data-deal-paves-the-way-for-esports-betting/#71f2ca075721